We have said enough to vindicate our assumed chronology and justify our readjustment of the calendar.  Europe may well be invited to celebrate her own political, social and material centennial in 1876, as truly as that of America.  Her intellectual revival indisputably contributed, through Franklin, Laurens, the Lees and others who were immediately within its influence, to bring on the American movement; and her thought, in turn, has since that juncture as certainly gravitated, in many of its chief manifestations, toward that of the New World.  Hers is the jubilee not less than ours.  The humblest cot on her broad bosom is the brighter for ’76.  By no means the least fortunate of the beneficiaries is Great Britain herself.  Contrast her present position as a government and a society with what it was when Liberty Bell announced the dismemberment of her empire.  Her rank among the nations has notably improved.  The population of England, Scotland and Wales was then estimated below eight and a half millions—­a numerical approximation, by the way, to the three millions of the colonies not sufficiently considered when we measure the stoutness of her struggle against them with France and Holland combined.  Of the continental powers, the French numbered perhaps twenty-two millions, Spain twelve, the Low Countries six, Germany thirty, Prussia seven, and so on.  From the ratio of one to nearly three, as compared with France, she has, if we include pacified and assimilated Ireland—­an element now of strength instead of weakness—­advanced to an equality.  She has equally gained on the others, except Prussia, with its aggregation of new provinces.  She may, furthermore, in the event of an internecine conflict with a combination, count upon the unwillingness of America to see her annihilated; not the least just of Tallyrand’s observations expressing his conviction that, though the two great Anglo-Saxon powers might quarrel with each other, they would not push such a dispute for the benefit of a third party.  But, dismissing the question of mere brute strength, Britain’s sentiment of pride is conciliated by the spectacle of an advance in the numbers speaking her tongue from eleven or twelve to eighty millions within the century, and that in considerable part at the expense of other languages; millions of foreign immigrants, parents or children, having abandoned their vernacular in favor of hers.

Let us now essay a light sketch of the stream at whose source we have glanced.  Light and superficial it must be, for to attempt more were to confront the vast and many-sided theme of modern civilization.  The nineteenth century, the child of history, has the stature of its progenitor.  It would fill more libraries.  Conditions, forces, results,—­all have been multiplied.  But a few centuries ago the world, as known and studied, was a corner of the Levant, with its slender and simple apparatus of life, social, political and industrial.  Later, its boundaries were extended over the remaining shores