Trollope, George Eliot, Disraeli, Kingsley, and others who lived after
that date. In 1865 Lord Palmerston died, and with him died the old
Parliamentary era. In the same year died Abraham Lincoln in the great
crisis of the reconstruction of the American Constitution. We attach
no peculiar importance to that date. But it is certain that both
English and American people have been in this last twenty-nine years
absorbed in constitutional agitations which go deep down into our
social system. We in England have passed from one constitutional
struggle to another, and we are now in the most acute stage of all this
period. Parliamentary reform, continental changes, colonial wars,
military preparations, Home Rule, have absorbed the public mind and
stunned it with cataracts of stormy debate. We are all politicians,
all party-men now.

There is upon us also, both in England and in America, a social ferment
that goes deeper than any mere constitutional struggle. It is the
vague, profound, multiform, and mysterious upheaval that is loosely
called Socialism--not Socialism in any definite formula, but the
universal yearning of the millions for power, consideration, material
improvement, and social equality. The very vagueness, universality,
and unbounded scope of the claim they make constitute its power. All
orders and classes are concerned in it: all minds of whatever type are
affected by it: every political, social, or industrial axiom has to be
reconsidered in the light of it: it appeals to all men and it enters
into life at every corner and pore. We are like men under the glamour
of some great change impending. The spell of a new order holds us
undecided and expectant. There is something in the air, and that
something is a vague and indescribable sense that a new time is coming.
Men felt it in France, and indeed all over Europe, from 1780 till 1790.
It was an uncertain and rather pleasing state of expectancy. It did