The World War

PREFACE

When the people of the United States heard the news of the assassination ofArchduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his wifein Sarajevo, Bosnia, on June 28, 1914, it was with a feeling of great regretthat another sorrow had been added to the many already borne by the agedEmperor 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 ofEurope within a week’s time from a state of profound peace into one ofcontinental war, unannounced, unexpected, unexplained, unprecedented insuddenness and enormity, was an unimaginable possibility. And yet the ringingof the church bells was suddenly drowned by the roar of cannon, the voice ofthe dove of peace by the blare of the trump of war, and throughout the worldran a shudder of terror at these unwonted and ominous sounds.

But in looking back through history, tracing the course of events during thepast century, following the footsteps of men in war and peace from that day ofupheaval when medieval feudalism went down in disarray before the arms of thepeople in the French Revolution, some explanation of the Great European war of1914 may be reached. Every event in history has its roots somewhere in earlierhistory, 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 ofapposite chapters the story of the past century, beginning, in fact, rathermore than a century ago with the meteoric career of Napoleon and seeking toshow to what it led, and what effects it had upon the political evolution ofmankind. The French Revolution stood midway between two spheres of history, thesphere of medieval barbarism and that of modern enlightenment. It exploded likea bomb in the midst of the self-satisfied aristocracy of the earlier socialsystem 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 populargovernment had replaced that of autocratic and aristocratic government inFrance, and the armies of Napoleon spread these radical ideas throughout Europeuntil the oppressed people of every nation began to look upward with hope andsee in the distance before them a haven of justice in the coming realm of humanrights.

It required considerable time for these new conceptions to become thoroughlydisseminated. A down-trodden people enchained by the theory of the “divineright of kings” to autocratic rule, had to break the fetters one by one andgradually emerge from a state of practical serfdom to one of enlightenedemancipation. There were many setbacks, and progress was distressingly slow butnevertheless 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 thedevelopment 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 asit has gone. Gradually the autocrat has declined in power and authority, andthe principle of popular rights has risen into view. This war will not havebeen fought in vain if, as predicted, it will result in the complete downfallof autocracy as a political principle, and the rise of the rule of the people,so that the civilized nat

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