ABSTRACT
The second stage of the nineteenth century begins with the July Revolution of 1830 and ends with the February Revolution of 1848. The thought and feeling of the age crystallized emphatically and exclusively upon questions of the day, and the European soul intoned a million-voiced political chant. This noisy battle-song had to happen, filling the whole Continent and outsinging all others, and the fact that it arose was the work, above all, of the very people who, by means as unwise as they were inhuman, had sought to suppress it. In it sang Fate, but discordantly. The most important machine, however, that was born in this period was the high-speed printing press, which automatically performed the operation hitherto done by the hand press, and at a rate many times as fast. For the illustrated journal lithography had somewhat the same importance as the machine press had for printed matter.
