One Hundred Years

Excerpt from One Hundred Years: 1816-1916 These are the chronicles of an old business house in the City of Philadelphia and a brief biography of the founder of that house together with some account of those who have followed in his footsteps. The founder of the business now known as William H. Horstmann Company was William H. Horstmann, a native of Cassel in the Province of Hesse-Nassau in Germany. Born in the year 1785, in the days when Frederick the Great was about to close his striking career and when time had just given birth to the lusty new nation of those days, the United States of America, the boyhood of young Horstmann was marked by stirring episodes and epochal events that were momentous in the history of the human race. Individual liberty was asserting itself more and more, class privileges were being narrowed and swept away, and the old order was gradually giving place to the new. The French Revolution, too, was smouldering under the thin lava of armed suppression and, uncontrollable, would soon break out in violent ferocity and atrocious disregard of the very human rights it was designed to champion. Napoleon Bonaparte, also, whose youth was about to merge into the activity of early manhood, was soon to begin the marvellous career that enchained the attention of the whole world until his star paled and set beyond the heights of St. Helena. 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.