Preface
Title || 1: All Europe Plunged into War
When the people of the United States heard the news of the
assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the throne
of Austria-Hungary, and his wife in Sarajevo, Bosnia, on June 28,
1914, it was with a feeling of great regret that another sorrow
had been added to the many already borne by the aged Emperor
Francis Joseph. That those fatal shots would echo around the
world and, flashing out suddenly like a bolt from the blue, hurl
nearly the whole of Europe within a week's time from a state of
profound peace into one of continental war, unannounced,
unexpected, unexplained, unprecedented in suddenness and
enormity, was an unimaginable possibility. And yet the ringing of
the church bells was suddenly drowned by the roar of cannon, the
voice of the dove of peace by the blare of the trump of war, and
throughout the world ran a shudder of terror at these unwonted
and ominous sounds.
But in looking back through history, tracing the course of events
during the past century, following the footsteps of men in war
and peace from that day of upheaval when medieval feudalism went
down in disarray before the arms of the people in the French
Revolution, some explanation of the Great European war of 1914
may be reached. Every event in history has its roots somewhere in
earlier history, and we need but dig deep enough to find them.
Such is the purpose of the present work. It proposes to lay down
in a series of apposite chapters the story of the past century,
beginning, in fact, rather more than a century ago with the
meteoric career of Napoleon and seeking to show to what it led,
and what effects it had upon the political evolution of mankind.
The French Revolution stood midway between two spheres of
history, the sphere of medieval barbarism and that of modern
enlightenment. It exploded like a bomb in the midst of the
self-satisfied aristocracy of the earlier social system and rent
it into the fragments which no hand could put together again. In
this sense the career of Napoleon seems providential. The era of
popular government had replaced that of autocratic and
aristocratic government in France, and the armies of Napoleon
spread these radical ideas throughout Europe until the oppressed
people of every nation began to look upward with hope and see in
the distance before them a haven of justice in the coming realm
of human rights.
It required considerable time for these new conceptions to become
thoroughly disseminated. A down-trodden people enchained by the
theory of the "divine right of kings" to autocratic rule, had to
break the fetters one by one and gradually emerge from a state of
practical serfdom to one of enlightened emancipation. There were
many setbacks, and progress was distressingly slow but
nevertheless sure.
The story of this upward progress is the history of the
nineteenth century, regarded from the special point of view of
political progress and the development of human rights. This is
definitely shown in the present work, which is a history of the
past century and of the twentieth century so far as it has gone.
Gradually the autocrat has declined in power and authority, and
the principle of popular rights has risen into view. This war
will not have been fought in vain if, as predicted, it will
result in the complete downfall of autocracy as a political
principle, and the rise of the rule of the people, so that the
civilized nations of the earth may never again be driven into a
frightful war of extermination against peaceful neighbors at the
nod of a hereditary sovereign.
Logan Marshall
