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THE THEORY OF PROGRESS IN ENGLAND.
1.
The idea of Progress could not help crossing the Channel.

France and England had been at war in the first year of the eighteenth century, they were at war in the last, and their conflict for supremacy was the leading feature of the international history of the whole century.
But at no period was there more constant intellectual intimacy or more marked reciprocal influence between the two countries.

It was a commonplace that Paris and London were the two great foci of civilisation, and they never lost touch of each other in the intellectual sphere.

Many of the principal works of literature that appeared in either country were promptly translated, and some of the French books, which the censorship rendered it dangerous to publish in Paris, were printed in London.
It was not indeed to be expected that the theory should have the same kind of success, or exert the same kind of effect in England as in France.