The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c6.s2.9

c6.s2.9

Coming specifically to politics, it has to be admitted that, strictly speaking, modern Europe and America do not date back earlier than 1866-1870. Europe was feudal and mediaeval almost down to that time. The political boundaries¹ were then almost as flexible as in the days of Charlemagne or the Guelphs and Ghibellins. America’s freedom was threatened in the second war with England (1812), and integrity jeopardized by the Civil War, of which also her old enemy England tried to take diplomatic advantage. Nationality existed only in limited degree before Mazzini and Bismarck; the dignity of labor was not recognized before Karl Marx and Louis Blanc; "popular" parliamentary institutions were all but unknown before the first Reform Bill of England; and the right of the masses to elementary education, the sole pre-condition of a real democracy, was not really a question of practical politics in the first half of the nineteenth century.