Before the gas lighting the streets where lit "by a few wretched oil lamps scattered distant intervals. P303-304.".
Also in the middle of the 19th century people were drinking from glasses and caps rather than from bottles, showing that people were becoming more sophisticated.
People could also take a voyage to America in ten days instead of 8 weeks because of the invention of steamboats. People also paid less in taxes in the mid 19th century. In 1850 a population of 30,000,000 would pay 50,000,000L in taxes but in 1801 a population of 15,000,000 would pay 63,000,000L in taxes (P. 304).
This whole excerpt from the book could be summarized somewhat as saying that life got much easier and safe around 1850 while the price to attain this life remained relatively low.
I"m not exactly sure if Walt Whitman is optimistic or pessimistic about the future in "Years of the Modern.".
In the first few paragraphs when he is talking about seeing "boundaries of frontiers of the old aristocracies broken and, the landmarks of European kings removed" he seems optimistic. But on page 305 when Whitman talks about "world-spreading factories" that will "interlink all lands" as well as speaking of a "general divine war" he seems pessimistic. The paragraphs on page 305 make it sound like the world is become too interconnected and big way too fast that it's not really a good thing.
Fredrich Engels defines the proletariat as "the herding together of a homeless population in the worst quarters of the large towns; the loosening of all traditional moral bonds, of patriarchal subordination, of family relations; overwork, especially of women and children, to a frightful extent; complete demoralization of the working class, suddenly flung into altogether new conditions, from the country into the town, from agriculture into modern industry, from stable conditions of existence into insecure ones that changed from day to day (p306 1st paragraph.
