Principles of western civilisation

358 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

the fact of the recent accession, by the masses of the people, to political power, as secured to them by universal suffrage or by a political franchise very widely extended. This revolution, the significance of which underlies all existing controversies as to the organisation of society and the prevailing distribution of wealth, dates back for its beginning scarcely more than a century. In England, where parliamentary government, almost in its modern form, appears to carry us back to Cromwell and Locke, it was not till 1832 that the franchise was conferred on the middle classes, and not till 1867 and 1885 that it was extended so as to include the great bulk of the people. On the continent of Europe the period mentioned has witnessed the establishment of universal suffrage, or forms of electoral franchise falling little short of it, in France, Germany, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Spain, and other less important States; Germany in 1867 and 1871, Spain in 1890, and Belgium in 1893, being amongst the more important countries which have recently adopted it. Even the government of the United States at the period of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 was virtually aristocratic, and it continued to be so till after the close of the revolution in 1783, up to which period a property qualification for the exercise of political power was still required in every State. Throughout the greater part of our Western world, and in the midst of the greatest accumulation of every form of human energy, wealth, and resources that the world has seen, there has, therefore, taken place within the space of little more than a century, and for the most part silently beneath the surface

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