Excerpt from Outlines of European History From the Opening of the Eighteenth, Century to the Present Day, Vol. 2 In a companion volume 1 the history of European civilization has been traced from the dim, prehistoric ages, when men lived in caves and used stone weapons and tools, through the civiliza tions of Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome and of the Middle Ages, to the new era which we call modern times. This modern era is the theme of the present volume. Just what is meant by modern times, however, is rather difficult to define. The term is an old one; Cicero, the Roman statesman, talked in antiquity of these modern times of ours, and so did the Greeks before him; and so, no doubt, did every people in every age that had any idea of time at all. But although we often use the term in this somewhat vague sense to mean the period in which our own lives are passed, historians have come to apply it to a somewhat definite era, namely, that stretch of three or four centuries, from the sixteenth or seven teenth to the twentieth, during which time the ways of thinking and living have been, upon the whole, more like What they are now than what they had been during the preceding centuries. In politics, literature, philosophy, in business methods, in ideas of progress and of national organization, the men of these centuries have had, more or less, a modern outlook. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.