PREFACE TO NEW EDITION ON Sunday, August 2, 1914, in the King of Roumania's summer residence at Sinaia, situated among the pine forests of the lower Carpathian Mountains, an interesting prophecy was made. The Queen, "Carmen Sylva," asked Take Jonescu, the brilliant lawyer and statesman, what the results of the war which was then just breaking out would be. Jonescu replied that no mortal could have the presumption to claim to know or to divine all the consequences of such a conflict: "However, I know four," he said, "and these four I can state in a few words. First, there will be such a revival of hatred among nations as has not been seen in centuries. This is as inevitable as the light of day. Secondly, there will be a lurch to the left, toward those ideas which are called Socialistic. Certainly in the long run nothing that is absurd can permanently triumph, but in every country the drift toward the extreme left is certain, once the governing classes seem in the eyes of the masses because of the letting loose of this frightful catastrophe - more incapable than they had thought. In the third place, Madame, there will be what I may call a cascade of thrones. Your Majesty, who has so often told me that she is a republican, will not be surprised at this prophecy. Only those monarchies which are in reality merely hereditary presidencies of republics, like the British monarchy, have a chance of escaping this terrible cascade which will justly issue from a war provoked by absolute sovereigns." Jonescu then explained to the Queen that because of this war the revolutionary movement, which for several decades had deserted the field of politics in order to limit itself to the field of economics, would inevitably become political once more. "Finally, I said," continues this discerning critic, "this war will hasten by fifty years the arrival of the United States at the moral leadership of the white race, an event which was inevitable in any case, but which the war will have accelerated. . . . As far as I am concerned this event will not be at all displeasing as the experiment which the United States is making of a new civilization, without prejudices, without castes, without monarchical or aristocratic institutions, is the most interesting experiment which mankind has ever yet seriously undertaken." The history of the past ten years is a sufficient commentary upon the power of precise prevision of this particular prophet. It is for the purpose of telling this later history that this new edition of EUROPE SINCE 1815 has been prepared. The original edition appeared in 1910. Since then the face of the world has been strangely and amazingly changed, and the process of accelerated evolution is still in full swing. This culminating, crowded, and strictly contemporary chapter in the annals of the race constitutes a challenge to the historian, and perhaps a trap. In this new edition I have reproduced the earlier one substantially intact, making, however, whatever additions and alterations have seemed desirable; enlarging, for example, my previous treatment of the Industrial Revolution, of Socialism, and of the German Empire under William II. In recounting the years from 1910 to 1919 I have freely used the material contained in my later book, MODERN EUROPE, abridging here and amplifying there. The chronicle of events since the middle of 1919 is entirely new and constitutes more than a fourth of the book. The space alloted to the events of the past few years may by some be considered disproportionate but, in my opinion, it is justified by the exceptional importance of the period. It would, I think, be entirely mechanical and needlessly inept for the historian to seek to give the same space in his narrative to equal spans of time, for the simple reason that equal chronological periods differ greatly from one another in significance of content. The French Revolutionists thought, and complacently announced, that they had made greater progress in six years than their predecessors had made in six centuries. They exaggerated - but not as much as their predecessors would have thought. Since the French Revolution there has been no period so replete with shattering events, so charged with dynamic force, so remarkable for the changes it has witnessed, as that which began in 1914. New factors, or old factors singularly intensified, have recently entered in profusion into contemporary history, to complicate and confuse; the astounding consequences of the war, the resurrection of old states, like Poland, long supposed to be extinct, the rise of new ones, like Czecho-Slovakia, the great enlargement of others, such as Roumania or Jugo-Slavia, the radical transformation of still others, like Austria and Hungary and Germany and Russia; the new breezes that are blowing with varying velocity throughout the vast reaches of the British Empire, subjecting the flexible framework of that structure to exceptional PREFACE TO NEW EDITION vii stress and strain; all the varied phenomena connected with that lurch to the left of which the Roumanian statesman spoke in that fateful summer of 1914, the disruption of Socialistic parties into factions under the disintegrating alchemy of the war, the subsequent wranglings of those factions, the varying fortunes and misfortunes of the Socialist movement in different countries ranging from the establishment of arbitrary, undemocratic and militaristic Communism in Russia to the stalemating of Socialism by "big business" in Germany and by Fascism in Italy, and to the constitutional agitation of the Labor Party in England. All these and many other topics demand notice in any survey of the history of Europe since the war and such notice cannot be unduly brief if it is to be really illuminating and explanatory. No succinct summary could possibly suffice to give a comprehensible picture. I have, in general, brought the history of Europe down to the mid-summer of 1923, obviously no logical or fixed terminus, there being none such at this end of the historic process. Contemporary history has only one definite terminus, namely its point of departure, and that, after all, is itself not so very definite, its proper location being the subject of much dispute. NEW YORK C. D. H. |