Problems of Peace From the Holy Alliance to the League of Nations, A from a European Writer to Americans Guglielmo Ferrero C A Short History of Koine, The wad Deolioe of G. P New York tad 1019 COPYRIGHT, 1919 BY GUGLIELMO FERRERO 1Ebe fcnfcfterbocber press, mew CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. To THE AMERICAN PEOPLE . . i II. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE AUSTRIAN EMPIRE …. 6 III. THE LEAGUE AND THE PEACE OF THE DYNASTIES 1815-1848 … 29 IV. THE REVOLUTION OF 1848 … 65 V. THE GREAT SURPRISE. THE GERMANIC TRIUMPH 1848-1870 …106 VI. THE GERMAN PEACE AND THE GER MANIZATTON OF EUROPE 1870-1914 . 165 VII. FROM THE HOLY ALLIANCE TO THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS … 240 Problems of Peace CHAPTER I TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE WILL they come or will they not J J That was the question which the combatants on either side put to each other as they looked anxiously towards the West. At first the horizon was calm and clear then far off appeared a tiny cloud of dust in the midst of which there could just be descried a flag or two, and here and there the glitter of a weapon. But the cloud broadened and ascended, tumultuous with men and coruscating with steel, and then, at last, there issued from its mighty depths, friend and foe those who exult and those who tremble, beheld a people in arms-an inex haustible flood, a final reserve, which came in time to decide the issue of the mightiest and bloodiest conflict ever waged by mankind. To us it seems a dream. Can the prodigy have 2 Problems of Peace really come to pass Can it really be that the United States in its turn precipitated itself into the struggle of the nations And my thoughts go back ten years to the long conversations I had towards the end of 1908 atthe White House with Theodore Roosevelt, and in so many other hospitable houses in Washington, from that of Baron Mayor des Planches to that of Elihu Root, with the men who were at that time governing the great Republic, to other conversations in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, in Pittsburg, and in distant Chicago, with authors and bankers, merchants and professors, journalists and minis ters of every religion and creed. How often in the course of such conversations have I not heard Americans of every position and status express, each in his own way, his admiration for European culture, for its schools, its art, its science, its monuments, and its history. With very few ex ceptions, however, Americans, while admiring the greatness of Europe, seemed to wish to keep out of our wars and our revolutions, to observe these In deed, but from a great distance by means of pow erful telescopes, as one would examine a cosmic catastrophe on another planet. Their attitude, if not calmly indifferent, resembled the sad serenity with which we contemplate the cataclysms of To the American People 3 Nature. And as every passion which we do not feel or understand seems foolish or even positively insane, this neutrality of view in the case of many Americans verged on the ironic compassion with which we smile at a revolution in China, a con spiracy in Turkey, a pronunciamento in South Am erica, or, in short, at any convulsion the motives of which we do not comprehend. Therefore I often asked myself whether America could ever acquire the melancholy understanding of our im placable hatreds, could ever grasp the meaning of the death struggle between Prance and Germany, the persecution of which the CatholicChurch has been in turn the author and the victim, the revolutionary strivings in the Russian Empire which resemble the sulphurous emanations and intermittent rumblings of a volcano half asleep, the bitter internal discords in Prance which die down only to revive again, or the hideous death agonies of the Hapsburgs…