QUEEN VICTORIA.
A.D. 1819.
“Broad based upon her people’s will,
And compassed by the inviolate sea.”
Tennyson, To the Queen.
FIFTY years a queen! and still seated upon her ancestral throne. This is the remarkable record of England’s present sovereign. This fact alone would make the reign of Queen Victoria illustrious. But more than this, she has reigned during one half of this marvellous nineteenth century—a period phenomenal among the centuries of history.
Although the Victorian Era has not produced a Shakespeare, a Homer, a Dante, or a Milton, it will be remembered as an epoch of astounding progress, not only in England and Europe, but throughout the civilized world.
The unprecedented onrush of the mighty waves of enlightened civilization, bearing to all lands the blessings of Christian liberty; the flashing and dazzling lights of wonderful inventions and results of scientific researches, which have belted the world with gleaming bands of iron, chained the lightning at man’s bidding, caught and imprisoned the waves of sound, unlocked the secrets of the earth, and almost annihilated space and time,—these are some of the marvellous achievements of the nineteenth century which make the history of the past one hundred years read like the story of the most amazing transformations ever invented by the imagination in Oriental fairy tales or attributed to the weird magicians of the Arabian Nights.
Telegraphs, railroads, telephones, electric lights, phonographs, photography, the discovery of petroleum, the improved use of steam, the invention of Bessemer steel, and the practical use of gaslight for the illumination of cities, are all numbered among the inventions and discoveries of the nineteenth century.
But more wonderful still, perhaps, is the rise of the mighty Republic of the United States, which, though beginning in the eighteenth century as an independent power, has, in the short space of a little more than one hundred years, taken the foremost place in the rank of nations, and stands to-day the miracle of the nineteenth century.