INTRODUCTION.
BY THE EDITOR OF THE “TEXTILE MERCURY."
The student of industrial, political, and social matters, coming to the investigation of the developments of the 19th century, will find in these subjects ample materia! to engage the services of schoolsful of colleagues. In no preceding period was the ferment of material science, mechanical invention, industrial change, political revolution, and social progress so active as during the century now nearing its close. No time in the past can compare with it, and, so far as we can see, though the future centuries may have much in store, they are not likely to eclipse it in any similar period of time. It seems to us that it will be much more accordant with the natural sequence of events, if the past affords grounds for any safe inferences regarding the future, that a long period of comparative repose should follow’ one of such unprecedented activity. Such periods succeeded the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Crusades, and the Reformation, and intervened between the English Revolution of 1688 and the French uprising of a century later. In these intervals there was little of intellectual activity, and less of social and industrial progress, whilst science in its best sense had hardly been born. These facts form a basis for the above reasonable and natural conclusion. Should it be realised, the students will be able to work at their investigations of 19th century life und progress undisturbed by the noise of