But as the home of mankind grew smaller to the imagination, so ...

But as the home of mankind grew smaller to the imagination, so the history of the race was perceived to I remarked to an old Gladstonian how quiet the Election of 1935 had been.

'Yes, he said, ' like 1874: very different from 1868. But then he had driven us so.' Before the first ferment over the Origin of Species had subsided, a new window had been opened on to the past. In 1860 John Henslow, famous throughout Europe as a botanist, and to his neighbours better known as an exemplary parish priest, crossed the Channel to examine for himself the prehistoric discoveries claimed by Boucher de Perthes in the valley of the Somme.

Convinced, his authority carried with it the consent of English science: a new age, not to be reckoned by the centuries of Europe or even the millennia of Egypt and Babylon, was thrown open to explorers, and close on the discovery of primitive man followed the discovery how much of man, not least his religion and his morality, was still primitive. We are passing from the statistical to the historical age, where the ground and explanation of ideas, as of institutions, is looked for in their origins: their future calculated by observation of the historic curve.

As Early Victorian thought is regulated by the conception of progress, so the late Victorian mind is overshadowed by the doctrine of evolution.