Excerpt from Main Currents of European History, 1815-1915 The substance of these ten lectures was delivered under the auspices of the London County Council to a large audience of teachers during the autumn of 1916. The purpose of the lectures was not-what is normally a proper function of lectures - to excite interest; for the audience was already professionally interested in the theme. Stili less was it - what is rarely legitimate in lectures - to impart detailed information; for the audience was already in possession of excellent text-books. The purpose was the lowly one of reducing a complex and confused century to comprehensible categories, of emphasising its dominant characteristics, of rendering it more readily teachable. In order to achieve this purpose the lecturer divided the century chronologically into half a dozen consecutive periods, and tried to find in each period some single prevailing feature. 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.