We have finished the irksome task of observing the process of dissolution of the old system of society during the last five centuries; and we may now turn to the pleasanter consideration of the reorganizing movement which was going on at the same time.

Date of modern history.

In fixing the date of the beginning of the new social formation, we must remember that there is an interval between the generation of new social classes and the first manifestation of their tendencies. Considered in this way, it is the opening of the fourteenth century that we must fix upon as the time when the organic industry of modern society began to assume a characteristic quality. All the chief tokens of civilization indeed concur in marking that era as the true origin of modern history. The industrial expansion was then signalized by the universal legal admission of communities as general and permanent elements of the political system, not only in Italy, where it had happened some time before, but throughout Western Europe, where the event was sanctioned by various titles in England, France, Germany, and Spain; and the fact is marked and confirmed by the vast insurrections which, in almost every country, and especially in France and England, testified, during the second half of the century, to the nascent force of the labouring classes against the powers which were, in the respective cases, specially opposed to them. At the same period the great institution of paid armies was established in Italy; and they, marking a phase of industrial life among modern peoples, are as important in the organic as in the critical connection.