ABSTRACT
The modern age, our age, began in the eigh-teenth century, it could be argued. In 1700 kings ruled in Europe with supreme authority, especially in France. By 1800, a century later, there was no longer a French monarchy, for it had been abolished by the citizenry. In 1700 the dispersed British colonists along the Atlantic seacoast of North America considered themselves, for the greater part, loyal subjects of a distant king. But a hundred years later, by 1800, they had successfully beaten the most powerful military force then existing in the Western world to obtain their freedom and then had formed a union of states, creating for themselves a representative republic that operated according to a written constitutional agreement. The former British subjects now governed themselves, the first men to do so since the early Roman Republic nearly eighteen hundred years earlier. The Amer-
icans’ example of self-governance set off a passion for similar self-governance that, more than two hundred years later, still inspires other peoples who live under the thumb of despots. During the eighteenth century a new age had begun to take shape.
