INTRODUCTION
"The movements in the masses of European peoples are divided and slow, and their progress interrupted and impeded, because they are such great and unequally formed masses; but the preparation for the future is widely diffused, and . . . the promises of the age are so great that even the most faint-hearted rouse themselves to the belief that a time has arrived in which it is a privilege to live."--GERVINUS, 1853.
The Roman poet Lucretius in an oft-quoted passage describes the satisfaction that naturally fills the mind when from some safe vantage-ground one looks forth on travellers tossed about on the stormy deep. We may perhaps use the poet's not very altruistic words as symbolising many of the feelings with which, at the dawn of the twentieth century, we look back over the stormy waters of the century that has passed away. Some congratulation on this score is justifiable, especially as those wars and revolutions have served to build up States that are far stronger than their predecessors, in proportion as they correspond more nearly with the desires of the nations that compose them.
As we gaze at the revolutions and wars that form the storm-centres of the past century, we can now see some of the causes that brought about those storms. If we survey them with discerning eye, we soon begin to see that, in the main, the cyclonic disturbances had their origins in two great natural impulses of the civilised races of mankind. The first of these forces is that great impulse towards individual liberty, which we name Democracy; the second is that impulse, scarcely less mighty and elemental, that prompts men to effect a close union with their kith and kin: this we may term Nationality.
Now, it is true that these two forces have not led up to the last and crowning phase of human development, as their enthusiastic champions at one time asserted that they would; far from that, they are accountable, especially so the force of Nationality, for numerous defects in the life of the several peoples; and the national principle is at this very time producing great and needless friction in the dealings of nations. Yet, granting all this, it still remains true that Democracy and Nationality have been the two chief formative influences in the political development of Europe during the Nineteenth Century.
In no age of the world's history have these two impulses worked with so triumphant an activity. They have not always been endowed with living force. Among many peoples they lay dormant for ages and were only called to life by some great event, such as the intolerable oppression of a despot or of a governing caste that crushed the liberties of the individual, or the domination of an alien people over one that obstinately refused to be assimilated. Sometimes the spark that kindled vital consciousness was the flash of a poet's genius, or the heroism of some sturdy son of the soil. The causes of awakening have been infinitely various, and have never wholly died away; but it is the special glory of the Nineteenth Century that races which had hitherto lain helpless and well-nigh dead, rose to manhood as if by magic, and shed their blood like water in the effort to secure a free and unfettered existence both for the individual and the nation. It is a true saying of the German historian, Gervinus, "The history of this age will no longer be only a relation of the lives of great men and of princes, but a biography of nations."
At first sight, this illuminating statement seems to leave out of count the career of the mighty Napoleon. But it does not. The great Emperor unconsciously called into vigorous life the forces of Democracy and Nationality both in Germany and in Italy, where there had been naught but servility and disunion. His career, if viewed from our present standpoint, falls into two portions: first, that in which he figured as the champion of Revolutionary France and the liberator of Italy from foreign and domestic tyrants; and secondly, as imperial autocrat who conquered and held down a great part of Europe in his attempt to ruin British commerce. In the former of these enterprises he had the new forces of the age acting with him and endowing him with seemingly resistless might; in the latter part of his life he mistook his place in the economy of Nature, and by his violation of the principles of individual liberty and racial kinship in Spain and Central Europe, assured his own downfall.
The greatest battle of the century was the tremendous strife that for three days surged to and fro around Leipzig in the month of October 1813, when Russians, Prussians, Austrians, Swedes, together with a few Britons, Hanoverians, and finally his own Saxon allies, combined to shake the imperial yoke from the neck of the Germanic peoples. This Völkerschlacht (Battle of the Peoples), as the Germans term it, decided that the future of Europe was not to be moulded by the imperial autocrat, but by the will of the princes and nations whom his obstinacy had embattled against him. Far from recognising the verdict, the great man struggled on until the pertinacity of the allies finally drove him from power and assigned to France practically the same boundaries that she had had in 1791, before the time of her mighty expansion. That is to say, the nation which in its purely democratic form had easily overrun and subdued the neighbouring States in the time of their old, inert, semi-feudal existence, was overthrown by them when their national consciousness had been trampled into being by the legions of the great Emperor.
In 1814, and again after Waterloo, France was driven in on herself, and resumed something like her old position in Europe, save that the throne of the Bourbons never acquired any solidity--the older branch of that family being unseated by the Revolution of 1830. In the centre of the Continent, the old dynasties had made common cause with the peoples in the national struggles of 1813-14, and therefore enjoyed more consideration--a fact which enabled them for a time to repress popular aspirations for constitutional rule and national unity.