College English Author:Frank Aydelotte Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II. AKNOLD'S IDEA OF CULTUKE. The nineteenth century in England was an age of expansion, that is to say of remarkable progress along many lines at the same... more » time. In the first place, it was an era of great industrial prosperity which advanced by such enormous strides that England took first rank in manufacturing and shipping among the powers of the world. Her princes and kings of finance grew steadily richer and richer while, for some dark reason, her poorer classes grew poorer and poorer, seeming by every invention which should have made their work lighter and their condition of life easier, to be plunged further into more and more hopeless poverty. It was an age of intellectual progress as well. Natural science, under the impetus of the conceptions formulated by Darwin and his associates, took possession of new fields of discovery and went forward at such a rate as to overshadow all other branches of knowledge and threaten to introduce its methods into every department of thought. At the same time the age was one of political advancement: it was pre-eminently the period of the struggle of the masses for political power, for extension of the right of suffrage—the period in which the great lower classes of England insisted upon and gained the right to rule themselves. It was also an age of change and popular advancement in education. Free schools multiplied, and in place of the older classical standardswe find a growing tendency to measure educational values by the standard of utility, the more and more frequent introduction into the curricula of the schools of those subjects which are directly and immediately useful for gaining a livelihood. Last of all, the nineteenth century was a period of great religious changes, of dissatisfaction with the Church of England, of the birt...« less