Page:The grand tour in the eighteenth century by Mead, William Edward.djvu/31

 ago! In comparison with the England that we know, eighteenth-century England was markedly provincial and insular. Until far beyond the middle of the century, Englishmen, though always ambitious and aggressive, had not enlarged their conceptions to the point of making England the center of a world-power. But they felt with reason that their country was the most favored land in Europe, and everywhere they went they instinctively claimed preëminence.

One inestimable advantage they had enjoyed for nearly three centuries. Although since the close of the Middle Ages almost every part of the Continent had been a battlefield, England, with the exception of the Puritan uprising and the futile attempts to restore the line of the Stuarts, had been free from war upon her own soil. And by her fortunate insular situation she was practically secure against attack from the Continent. The period since the Revolution of 1688 had been marked by increasing material prosperity, which had diffused habits of expensive living and stimulated the desire to see life in other lands. Not everything was perfect in eighteenth-century England. Great inequalities prevailed. Parliament was unreformed. Social conditions among the lower classes were pitiful. But while there were vice and brutality and misery in eighteenth-century England, as everywhere else, nowhere in Europe was a man freer to live his own life and to express his own views on society, politics, or religion.

Another fact worthy of note is that the country was not overpopulated. In 1750, England and Wales counted 6,400,000 inhabitants, and not until the end of the century did the population rise to 9,000,000. London in the middle of the eighteenth century had something like 600,000 inhabitants, — no insignificant number, it is true, but not so large as to preclude a man in society from the possibility of knowing almost everybody of importance. Naturally, then, society was more a unit than it is to-day. Men of the upper social class had about the same education — not too thorough, but including a tolerable acquaintance