Democratic Tendencies in the 19th C

Democratic Tendencies in the Nineteenth Century as Revealed in England and American Literature.

An effort to analyze and interpret the life of our people in our own century is almost as presumptious an undertaking as that to penetrate the secrets of our own hearts. Self-love proverbially stands in the way of self-knowledge: we are too near ourselves no doubt

to see ourselves clearly; and we recognize something of the same difficult nearness when we turn and face the century we have just left behind us in the calendar though for good or ill we carry it onward with us in our blood. We are bone of its bone, flesh of its flesh, and can make no pretense to disintested judgement. Yet self-examination is often fascinating and sometimes salutary; and an honest effort to bring

into greater clearness our more or less vague notions of the meaning and tendencies of our century among ourselves and our kindred of the same effects so as either to justify them or abandon them, may not be waste of time, may ever help us to face the present and the near future with more intelligence.

My own leading notion about the nineteenth century, if I can discover one that deserves to be so called, at all

events the notion that oftenest thrusts itself forward of late is a notion [strikethrough: a notion] one that I suppose I share with a very great majority of my fellow men in this country, a notion that I would fair believe to be well founded — the notion that the nineteenth century must be named preeminently the democratic century. Side by side with this and in my own mind allied with it is the belief that the century is almost equally distinguished for the

molding of thought by scientific theories.

By naming the nineteenth century a democratic century I mean not merely that it was democratic as compared with previous centuries but that with all the ebbing and flowing of its life currents the main movement was toward democracy. This is a good vague well-sounding proposition, so in harmony with our American predjudices as to be agreeable, so general as to be accepted