^THESTORYOF- THENINETEENTH CEnTVRY' ~ ELBRIDGE SBRCJDKS lit THE FIRST TELEGRAM {Chamber of the Suproiie Court, U'ashi>igto>i, May 24, 1844.) Professor Morse sendino the Despatch as Dictated by Miss Annie Ellsworth — the Key Note to the Achievements of the Nineteenth Century: "WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT" {See Page 180.) The STORY OF THE j. ^ j. NINETEENTH CENTURY ^ J. J. Of the CHRISTIAN ERA By ELBRIDGE S. BROOKS M Author of "The True Story of the United States," "The Story of Our War With Spain" "The American Soldier," "The American Sailor," "In Blue and White" Etc. " God 's in his heaven — All 's right with the world!" Robert Browning. ILLUSTRATED BOSTON: LOTHROP PUBLISHING COMPANY COPYRIGHT, igoo, BY LOTHROP PUBLISHING COMPANY. ""^ ^ ;1\S^« ^0^ SECOND EDITION PROM Norwood Press : Printed by Berwick &» Smith. PREFACE. WITHOUT binding myself to the fiat of the mathe- matician, or the assumption of the Emperor of Germany, I have taken, for the purpose of this "story," the convenient round numbers of 1800 to 1900, inclusive, as constituting the Nineteenth Century. Years count for but little in the evolution of a divine plan, and the tyranny of figures is a matter of human limitation ; but the one hundred years, stretching from 1800 to 1900, certainly register the high-water mark of human development, and record the sublimest triumph of divine intention. From the rise and fall of Napoleon to the regnant supremacy of the people, the Nineteenth Century marched steadily on through effort to accomplishment, and, in all departments of human effort and human achievement, proved its right to be esteemed, in every sense, the "Wonderful Century." If, in attempting to tell, briefly and generally, the story of the Nineteenth Century I have fallen short in the rec- ord, or have been hampered by an impossible adjustment of the overabundance of material to the limitations of space, I shall still be satisfied if I may lead my readers to investi- gate and study more closely the remarkable happenings of the one hundred years of progress that are here imperfectly set down. This one thing any story of the Nineteenth Century, S 6 PREFACE. whether briefly or bulkily told, must show : Progress, — progress in government, in literature, in law, in science, art, and the methods of application ; progress, especially, in human affairs and in the elevation and freedom of man. "The fact of our time which overshadows all others," says Benjamin Kidd, "is the arrival of Democracy." As a true democracy is the soul of progress, so this story of the Nineteenth Century has aimed to associate the growth of intelligence with the development of the people, and the triumphs of invention with the gradual " uplift " of mankind. In the hope that this rapid survey of the world's ad- vancement since the days when Franklin foresaw so clearly the triumphs of human endeavor, and Washington saw as clearly the possibilities of independence, may lead all who read it to appreciate the fact that in spite of suspicion and selfishness, in spite of evil and error, the world is ever growing better, and that divine purpose never takes a backward step, the author dedicates his story to all lovers of humanity, liberty, and equality, and especially to that great English-speaking race which, if true to its own tradi- tions, is, as one student of development declares, " destined to play an immense part in the immediate future of the world." "Whenever I meditate upon government," says Rousseau, " I am happy to find in my investigations new reasons for loving that of my own country." May that loyalty to their own homeland be the possession of all who honor these pages with their attention. ELBRIDGE S. BROOKS. Boston, March 15, 1900. CONTENTS. PACK Chap. I. How the Century Began 13 First Period. The Age of Napoleon. Chap. II. When One Man Strove to Master the World ... 31 Chap. III. The Grip of "The Man on Horseback" .... 47 Second Period. The Age of Wellington. Chap. IV. How Napoleon's Star Set at Last 65 Chap. V. How the Desire for Independence Grew .... 81 Third Period. The Age of Bolivar. Chap. VI. How the First Quarter Ended 99 Chap. VII. When the World Grew in Manliness 119 Fourth Period. The Age of Jackson. Chap. VIII. How the World had a New Shaking up ... . 133 Chap. IX. What " Old Hickory " Helped to Accomplish . . 147 Fifth Period. The Age of Kossuth. Chap. X. Why the People grew Restless 165 Chap. XI. How All the World had another Shaking up . . . 182 Sixth Period. The Age of Cavour. Chap. XII. On the Portal of the Future 201 Chap. XIII. How One Man Liberated a Nation 220 Seventh Period. The Age of Lincoln. Chap. XIV. How Another Man Enfranchised a Race .... 239 Chap. XV. How Liberty and Union came in more lands than One 260 7 8 CONTENTS. Eighth Period. The Age of Bismarck. pagb Chap. XVI. When the World Readjusted Itself 279 Chap. XVII. The Last " One-Man Power" of the Century . . 297 Ninth Period. The Age of Tolstoi, Chap. XVIII. How the World began to Try the Golden Rule . 313 Chap. XIX. How the Nations Extended Their Influence . . 326 Tenth Period. The Age of Edison. Chap. XX. When Men began to Prove the Value of Things . 345 Chap. XXI. How the Century Closed 362 Chronological Record of the Nineteenth Century . . . 385 Index 397 ILLUSTRATIONS. The First Telegram Frontispiece. AUSTERLITZ AND NAPOLEON faces 46 Waterloo and Wellington " 80 Types of the Age of Bolivar " 116 Types of the Age of Jackson " 146 Types of the Age of Kossuth " 182 Types of the Age of Cavour " 220 Abraham Lincoln " 260 Sedan and Bismarck " 296 Types of the Age of Tolstoi " 326 Types of the Age of Edison " 362 THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. "A century of analysis and reve- lation which has reduced the size of the world, and the -width of tlie oceans ; a century of federation and of brotherly love ivhich has bound men closer and closer together.'''' Edward Everett Hale. TO THE CENTURIES: '■'■ I am the Century the Nineteenth from Christ! And though I guarded well thy treasures rare, — Inheritance unequalled and unpriced, For me the day's appointed task sufficed, To lighten and to ease the lot of man. From elemental strongholds I enticed Strange Titans hidden since the world began; Now, God's best creature wields them, subject to his plan. " I am the Century the Nitieteenth from Christ! What goeth from us, is beyond recall ; Yet unto every age there shall befall A revelation for its heart alone: Lo 1 I have kept my Weak Ones from the wall, And to my Strong their feebleness have shown; The letter fades apace — the spirit must atone 1" Edith Matilda Thomas. From the " Critic " for December, i8 Stung to foolish and hasty action by the demands of their own hot heads and the defiant position of Major Anderson and his little command, the South Carolina forces opened fire on Fort Sumter on the twelfth of April, 1861 ; on the fourteenth the fort surrendered, riddled by the bombard- ment and wasted by fire ; but Major Anderson had done his duty, and the foolish action of "the first gun " threw the responsibility of war upon the Southern leaders, and aroused the North to united, determined, and patriotic action. Then war followed — the most determined and, in many respects, the most notable struggle of the century ; for it was waged for a principle, by men of equal courage, equal fortitude, and equal will, brothers in speech and lineage ; the most dreadful of all conflicts — a civil war. HOW ANOTHER MAN ENFRANCHISED A RACE. 249 Great armies were raised ; great battles were fought ; great victories were won. There was patriotism according to the Northern idea north of the Potomac ; south of the Potomac there was patriotism according to the Southern idea ; and on both sides were valor, devotion, sacrifice, and faith. Speedily a great general was made leader on the Southern side — Robert E. Lee ; gradually a greater general was evolved on the Northern side — Ulysses S. Grant ; and finally, after months and years of mistakes, errors, failures, re-enforcements, and successes, the war be- came a campaign, desperately waged for victory, between those two rival captains. The struggle was fought out on Southern soil ; only once did the Confederate armies succeed in an invasion of the north ; and at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, on the first, second, and third of July, 1863, the invaders were repulsed and driven back after one of the decisive battles of the world — the terrible battle of Gettysburg. The war hinged mainly on the possession of the border States — those that had always formed the dividing-line between North and South, between slavery and freedom ; and it was due to the patient determination of an even greater leader than Grant or Lee — Abraham Lincoln, the president — that these border States were held, saved, and retained for the Union. By his wise, patient, and conservative action, — yielding neither to the defiance of the South nor to the impatience of the North, swayed neither by victory nor defeat, by failure or success, — Abraham Lincoln held strictly to his course — to save the Union. Then, at last, when after two years of uncertain war and ineffectual campaigns, he 250 THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. saw that the people of the North were beginning to beheve in him alone, to trust to him and to him only as the real saviour of the Union ; when he knew that the time was ripe for one vital and crowning act that would strengthen the North, compel the rebellious South, convince the wavering border States, and show the watching world that the gov- ernment of the United States was pledged to freedom as well as nationality, Abraham Lincoln acted. On the first of January, 1863, he issued the emancipation proclamation, which he had long contemplated ; in which, as he declared, " I am going to fulfil the promise made to myself and to my God ; " for which, so he told his cabi- net, he alone was responsible. " I do not wish for your advice about the main matter ; that I have determined for myself," he said. And thus that immortal document ran : "Now therefore I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power vested in me as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against the au- thority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion, do, on this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, in accordance with my purpose so to do, order and declare that all per- sons held as slaves within said designated States and parts of States are and henceforth shall be free, and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons." It was done ; this edict, which, as Mr. Rhodes declares, "heralded a new epoch in the world's progress," was thus HOW ANOTHER MAN ENFRANCHISED A RACE. 25 1 given to the world, and the nature and complexion of the republic's struggle for union and nationality were utterly and irrevocably changed. And not only was the complexion of the war for the Union changed by Abraham Lincoln's immortal act ; pub- lic opinion throughout the world was changed. England, which had too long toyed with the question of right, and to the eternal shame of Gladstone, England's leading states- man, had leaned towards recognition of the Southern Con- federacy, — a possible power based upon the slavery that England had so arrogantly condemned, — was turned by Lincoln's act of justice from foe to friend ; that is to say, the people of England, led by such inspired men as John Bright, became staunch supporters of the Union, and gave a hearty amen to the prayer of their great preacher, New- man Hall : " God bless and strengthen the North ; give victory to their arms ! " France, whose emperor from the first was unfriendly to the Union, really favored the North ; for, remembering her own struggle for freedom, the people, as John Stuart Mill wrote from Southern France to an American friend, "are unquestionably with you." The people of Europe, indeed, so far as they compre- hended the situation, were friendly to the people of the American Republic ; but with the rulers it was different. Chief among these unfriendly rulers was, as I have inti- mated, the Emperor of the French. Professing to derive his title from the will of the people, Louis Napoleon recog- nized no will as superior to his own, and schemed to con- trol affairs not only in Italy, Syria, and Algeria, — in Europe, Asia, and Africa, — but in America as well. Pos- ing as the Heaven-sent leader of the Latin race, he sent his 252 THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. thoughts across the sea, and saw his opportunity in dis- tracted America, where, as he fondly dreamed, the Repub- lic of the United States was doomed to speedy destruction, and where he might, therefore, safely set on foot an enter- prise that should exalt the Latin over the Anglo-Saxon race, and make Napoleon III. the head and hero of it all. To this restless adventurer opportunity was never lack- ing. The sympathy of Europe was with Italy rather than with him, because of his double dealing toward the Italian desire for nationality ; and he felt that he must recover his lost prestige, especially with the French people, who always mistrusted, even when they supported him, because his name seemed to them a guaranty of strength and order. Across the sea, in the republic of Mexico, there had been unsettled and revolutionary conditions ever since the close of the war with the United States in 1848, and the overthrow and flight of the dictator Santa Anna in 1853. Spanish-American republics learn the wisdom of order slowly ; and Mexico, from the time of her independence, had been especially unfortunate — though the most un- stable republic was preferable to Spanish despotism. But out of these confusions finally emerged in 1861 a semblance of peace, with the victory of the liberalist, Benito Juarez, as president of the republic, and the suc- cessful termination of the three years' War of Reform. In this war, however, the property of certain foreigners resi- dent in Mexico had suffered loss, while the expense of redeeming the republic from the grasp of the reactionists and " illiberals," crippled the country, and led Juarez and his congress to the unwise measure of suspending the payment of bonds and foreign obligations. HOW ANOTHER MAN ENFRANCHISED A RACE. 253 This of course angered the foreign governments whose subjects were thus affected ; and the three powers most interested — England, France, and Spain — demanded justice and a settlement of the claims for indebtedness, amounting to over eighty millions of dollars. At a con- vention at London in 1861, the three powers made an alliance to enforce their demands ; and in January, 1 862, the republic of Mexico was invaded by a joint military and naval expedition of England, France, and Spain. The United States, when urged to join this debt-collect- ing alliance, bluntly refused ; and instead, offered to help Mexico either with money or credit. But the allies would have justice only from Mexico, and the Mexicans prepared to fight. By some wise management, however, on the part of Mexican diplomats, the trouble was arranged so far as England and Spain were concerned. Spain found that her dream of reconquering Mexico for the Spanish crown was not possible ; and England, not altogether satisfied with the company into which she had fallen, hastened to agree to any just compromise. But the Emperor Napoleon III. believed that his great opportunity had come. His soldiers were on Mexican soil ; across the border, the great republic, that had given him welcome and a home in his days of exile and disaster, was fighting for its very existence. There was no time like the present ; and Louis Napoleon, with all the ambi- tion and none of the ability of his great uncle, determined to carry out his scheme of control, make true his dream of a universal fusion of the Latin race and the overthrow of the Anglo-Germanic powers, and establish in Mexico a 254 THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. great Latin empire, of which France — and therefore Louis Napoleon Bonaparte — should be mainspring, dictator, and head. So, when the other allies withdrew, the French troops remained ; and, joining to themselves certain recreant Mexicans who were ready to conspire against the republic, they marched into the interior. The patriots rallied to repel the invasion, and on the fifth of May, 1862, won the victory of Puebla, still a national anniversary under the title of "the glorious fifth of May." But Napoleon had made up his mind. Defeat could not be permitted. Re-enforcements were hurried across the sea until their numbers were irresistible ; the French troops advanced steadily to victory, conquering the north and south. Occupying the city of Mexico, they first estab- lished a provisional government that usurped the executive power, and then, under orders from Napoleon, decreed the Empire of Mexico, and offered the crown to a Euro- pean prince, Maximilian, archduke of Austria, and brother of its emperor. In June, 1864, the Austrian arrived in Mexico ; upheld and defended by foreign bayonets, he ruled as emperor in the "halls of the Montezumas," and Napo- leon's crazy scheme of conquest and Latin supremacy seemed on the highroad to success. In other parts of the world, also, the Emperor Napoleon was striving to have the foremost "finger in the pie." He had forced from Italy, as the price of his " assistance," the provinces of Nice and Savoy ; and Germany was only re- strained by the cooling advice of England from the in- dignant protest of war over what would some day become a question of Franco-German boundaries. Napoleon's HOW ANOTHER MAN ENFRANCHISED A RACE. 255 agents intrigued in Belgium for the annexation of that kingdom to France ; and other of his agents, in the same business, stirred up war between Spain and Morocco ; his soldiers occupied the chief military posts in Syria, and kept England perplexed over the imperial plotter's designs in the East. He attempted to dictate to England as to her action when, in 1863, the Poles broke out in another insurrection, and he almost involved France in a " single- handed war " with Russia. He set Europe laughing at his pretensions as he endeavored to follow his great uncle's lead, and assemble a convention of kings at Paris ; and, by secretly encouraging the designs of Prussia in her great land-steal of the province of Schleswig-Holstein from Den- mark, he helped bring about the Schleswig-Holstein War of 1864, in which Prussia and Austria united against Den- mark. This war was concluded in a few months by the defeat of the Danes, a truce and peace conference at London, and finally, by the treaty of Vienna, on the thirtieth of October, 1864, under which Denmark relinquished the old Danish provinces of Schleswig-Holstein to the victorious allies. There was, in fact, a good deal of restlessness and strife throughout the world between i860 and 1865. Besides the great struggle in the United States, the war in Mex- ico, the Prussian attack on Denmark, and the war for hberation in Italy, there were rebellions in Poland, New Zealand, and China. Spain sought the conquest of Morocco ; and Russia quelled into submission the long defiant Circassians of the Caucasus, and advanced her power by force in Central Asia. 256 THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. But, in spite of wars and rumors of wars, the world made a substantial advance ; and Galileo's famous declara- tion, under equally unfavorable conditions, "and yet it moves," might apply to this season of unrest, when, in- deed, England was the only power pursuing a policy of peace. For in the same year in which the war for free- dom and union broke out in America, and while Italy was struggling for independence, the last man of all the world from whom a progressive advance might be expected, took a mighty stride forward. On the third of March, 1861, the day before that on which Abraham Lincoln was inau- gurated president of the United States, Alexander II., Czar of all the Russians, emancipated the serfs in his dominions, and practically abolished manhood slavery. Whether this act of liberation came from his own pro- gressive ideas, or was the heritage of a command from his dying and defeated father, it was certainly a mighty deed — a concession of despotism to liberty, of bigotry to progress. Other lands were making similar concessions at about that same period of the world's history The Japanese, for centuries confined within the limits of their own bar- baric exclusiveness, awoke from their long sleep of ages when Perry the American knocked at their door, and fol- lowed up their treaty of commerce and amity by sending an embassy from this island kingdom to meet and study the civilizations of the world. On the fourteenth of May, i860, the Japanese embassy was received at Washington ; from America it crossed the sea, and visited most of the European capitals, thus laying the foundations for that direct and friendly association with the outside world HOW ANOTHER MAN ENFRANCHISED A RACE. 257 which resulted finally in the establishment of treaty rela- tion with eighteen civilized nations. A new era began, also, in Germany in the accession to the throne of Prussia, in 1861, of King William the First ; while the American visit of the Prince of Wales, the heir to the English throne, began the gradual drawing nearer, in i860, of two nations kindred in speech and manners, after nearly a century of distrust and separation. This growing consideration and friendliness between England and America felt its severest strain, and stood its direst test, as the war between the States of the Ameri- can Union began to have a resultant influence upon Eng- lish society and people. From some inexplicable cause the ruling classes in England favored the Southern cause ; but the working-men of England favored the North in its efforts to re-establish union and proclaim liberty. Even while Gladstone, prime minister of England, was saying in a public speech "We may anticipate with certainty the success of the Southern States so far as their separation from the North is concerned," John Bright, the real leader of England's liberal and progressive thought at that time, declared to the English people : " I say that this war, be it successful or not, be it Christian or not, be it wise or not, is a war to sustain the government, and to sustain the authority of a great nation ; and that the people of England, if they are true to their own sympathies, to their own his- tory, and to their own great act of 1834, will have no sym- pathy with those who wish to build up a great empire on the perpetual bondage of milUons of their fellow men." There was a strong movement, however, among the rul- ing men in England to recognize the Southern Confederacy, 258 THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. or at least to prevail upon France, Russia, and the other " great powers " to intervene in the struggle that was shak- ing the republic. But the clear-headed and wise queen of England would not consent, and threw all her influence on the side of the North ; while the real workers of England, the five million disfranchised men and the four millions who had a vote, stood loyal to freedom and the cause of the Union as it was being fought out in America, even when the failure of the cotton crop, upon which their daily bread almost de- pended, drove the working-people of England close to suffering and starvation. Let America remember that to-day, even as Abraham Lincoln did when, in 1863, he wrote to the working-men of Manchester : " I cannot but regard your decisive utterances as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country. It is indeed an energetic and re- inspiring assurance of the inherent power of truth, and of the ultimate and universal triumph of justice, humanity, and freedom." " We have reason to thank the English common people," wrote Mr. Rhodes in 1 899, " for their comprehension, right thinking, and hearty utterance of sympathy, and for their appreciation and admiration of Abraham Lincoln. They received his words gladly ; and while trained writers criti- cised his grammar, his 'inelegant English,' his backwoods style of expression, they grasped the ideas for which he "stood, and their hearts went out to him." Lincoln's "grammar, inelegant English, and backwoods expressions," of which the cultured classes complained, have to-day a place in English Hterature which neither the HOW ANOTHER MAN ENFRANCHISED A RACE. 259 ponderous phrases of English orators nor the tripping sen- tences of English writers can surpass. For his words went straight to the root of things, and found lodgment in every heart that beat responsive to the love of freedom and the appreciation of simple and rugged eloquence. His two-minute speech, on " the second great day at Get- tysburg," as Mr. Mabie fitly characterizes it, at the dedi- cation of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg — the memorial field of that great and decisive battle of the war — was "notable," says Mr. Morse, "because through it the literature of our tongue received one of its most distin- guished acquisitions;" even to-day it rings out, not to America only, but to all the world, like a trumpet-note of exultant freedom, voiced by a master, a prophet, and a man. " Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal . . . We are met on a great battle-field. . . . We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. ... It is for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us . . . that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain ; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of free- dom ; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." CHAPTER XV. HOW LIBERTY AND UNION CAME IN MORE LANDS THAN ONE. {Frojti i86_§ to i8yo.) THE "great task," for which Lincoln so eloquently pleaded at Gettysburg, very nearly approached com- pletion when the year 1865 was born. Four years of terrible war had brought victory to the armies of the Union ; foreign hostility and foreign inter- ference had been stilled by the knowledge of American determination and freedom's wonderful success ; the Eman- cipation Proclamation of 1863 cleared the atmosphere and electrified the world. The schemes of Louis Napoleon, who sought to lead the powers of Europe into intervention, recognition, and "perhaps," as he suggested, "even more active measures," were beaten down by the hammer-blows of Grant and the magnificent patience and persistence of Lin- coln. Russia returned a decisive and instant refusal ; Ger- many bought United States bonds with perfect confidence, and "was obstinately bent against " the cause of the bellig- erent Confederacy. "All parties and classes in Europe," wrote Mr. Adams in 1865, "are resolved on a strict neutral- ity;" and John Bright, in the fall of 1864, wrote to Charles Sumner, "to re-elect Mr. Lincoln will be to tell Europe that your country is to be restored and slavery destroyed." That announcement to Europe and the world was made in November, 1864. Abraham Lincoln was re-elected 260 ABRAHAM LINCOLN From Brady's Originai, Photograph "New birth of our new soil, the first A merican ' HOW LIBERTY AND UNION CAME. 26 1 president of the United States by two hundred and twelve electoral votes against his opponent's twenty-one, and by a clear majority of half a million in the popular vote. " Seldom in history," said Emerson, " was so much staked on a popular vote ; I suppose never in history." " It is not wise to swap horses when crossing streams," declared Mr. Lincoln in the quaint, homely, direct phrase that the people loved. No " swapping " was done ; the war was to be fought to a final and triumphant end ; and that end came when, on the ninth of April, 1865, General Lee surrendered his army at Appomattox to General Grant. The South had fought nobly, persistently, valiantly. Against ever-increasing odds ; against the growing hostility of the world ; against privation, suffering, disaster, and loss, they still fought on, and only gave up the struggle when they recognized the uselessness of continued conflict, the loss forever of the chief privilege for which they had fought, and the slowly growing conviction that an undivided union, pledged to free- dom and founded on equality, was stronger and better than two rival and separate repubhcs, or than a loose confeder- acy of States built on the theory of temporary rather than indissoluble association. " I can promise for the Southern people," said General Lee, after it was all over, "that they will faithfully obey the Constitution and laws of the United States, treat the negro with kindness and humanity, and fulfil every duty incumbent on peaceful citizens, loyal to the Constitution of their country." "With malice toward none, with charity for all," said Mr. Lincoln in his immortal second inaugural, "with firmness 262 THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the Nation's wounds ... to do all which may cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." It was not to be permitted to this great and noble man to finish the work. He saw the end of the conflict ; he walked, not in triumph but in sadness, through the streets of the fallen capital of the short-lived Confederacy ; then, like Moses standing in view of the promised land, he died, stricken down by an assassin's bullet and a villain's deed, just when the South needed his wisdom and his love even more than did the triumphant North. So the great man of the century passed out of life ; and as the whole world, just learning to appreciate his worth as, to-day, it is just beginning to recognize his real great- ness, mourned its loss, the words of the American poet, Willis, written upon the death of a much smaller great man, were aptly fitted to the departure of this, — " the first American :" " For the stars on our banner grown suddenly dim, Let us weep in our darkness; but weep not for him: — Not for him who, departing, left millions in tears ; Not for him who has died, full of honors and years; Not for him who ascended fame's ladder so high, From the round at the top he has stepped to the sky." To me Abraham Lincoln is the typical man of the Nine- teenth Century. Can any one of any blood in any land — Christian or pagan — stand as his equal ? None surely will question his claim to being esteemed the typical American. That prophet-poet who foresaw so clearly — Lowell, the highest type of American culture — HOW LIBERTY AND UNION CAME. 263 has sketched the martyr-president in lines now grown familiar : " Great captains with their guns and drums Disturb our judgment for the hour, But at last silence comes ; These all are gone, and, standing like a tower, Our children shall behold his fame, The kindly-earnest, brave, fore-seeing man. Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame, New birth of our new soil, the first American." After the bloody arbitrament of war, other disturbances and happenings seem small by comparison. But the moral battle-field is often the sterner and more stubborn of the two. In America the new president, Andrew Johnson, and the Congress were confronted with the questions of reward and punishment, and of the methods of restoring the rights and privileges of citizens to the inhabitants of the Southern States. It proved a complex and puzzling problem, fertile with the mistakes of partisan or fanatical " reconstructors," unrepentant "rebels," and unwise offi- cials and law-makers. The problem involved the security and safety of the exhausted South, to which the triumphant North was pledged, but in which the emancipated negroes were made the factors in a campaign of overturned condi- tions, that threw the lowest order of demagogues to the surface, and awoke the passions rather than the patience of the land-owners of the South. It involved even the president of the United States himself, as a border man of personal obstinacy and antagonistic tendencies, who, in seeking to enforce his own ideas, swung away from the party that had placed him in power, and became so hostile to the majority in Congress as to lead to his impeachment, 264 THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. in which he only escaped conviction and removal by a slender majority. The disputes that filled his presidency hindered the reconstruction of the Union, bur law and order at last prevailed ; while the glory of the republic and its true meaning as the land of liberty were established by two Amendments to the Constitution, one of which, in 1865, officially established Lincoln's decree of emancipation, by declaring the absolute and entire abolition of slavery ; while the other, adopted in 1868, guaranteed the protection of the law to all, and made all native or naturalized resi- dents of the republic, citizens of the United States. It was a mighty step in advance, made at the cost of thousands of lives and millions of treasure, in the war waged for the in- tegrity of the Union and the freedom and equality of man. The close of the civil war in the United States hastened the overthrow of that other monstrous and futile attempt against personal and national liberty in America. The ambitious and aristocratic schemes of the Emperor Louis Napoleon, looking to the establishment of an empire in Mexico, ruled over by one of his puppets, and having for its purpose the overthrow of Anglo-Germanic supremacy by the unity of the Latin races, were rudely and utterly brought to naught by the re-establishment of the complete authority of the Union. A veteran army of victorious Americans was ready to enforce, if need be, the assertion of the Monroe doctrine, and to succor the threatened liber- ties of Mexico. Troops were massed on the Mexican bor- der; the French minister was notified that the French must leave — and they left. Louis Napoleon, baffled and defeated in an enterprise unpopular even in France, made HOW LIBERTY AND UNION CAME. 265 a virtue of necessity ; and in March, 1867, he withdrew the French armies from Mexico, leaving his " assisted Emperor" Maximihan deserted and alone. The end came speedily. Unprotected by French bay- onets, the " empire " of Maximilian crumbled at once ; and the unfortunate young Austrian, captured by the Mexican patriots, who knew not the clemency of their northern neighbors, was adjudged an enemy of the republic, and promptly put to death. And thus the pretentious experi- ment of a Latin empire in North America went down in inevitable and dismal failure, while the tragedy of Maximil- ian and Carlotta stands as another terrible warning to usurpers and kings. Meantime, across the sea, Louis Napoleon was having troubles of his own, and was stupidly but perhaps uncon- sciously laying in his own path snares and pitfalls, destined soon to trap and destroy him. His power indeed seemed supreme, but it was hollow and inflated; the " Sphinx of the Tuileries," as that practical American and sound republican, John Hay, called him, was found to have, after all, but "feet of clay ;" and the people of France as well as of the world were gradually finding him out. His unwise interference in Mexico ; his weak and futile attempt to "maintain the predominance of France" in the Schleswig- Holstein war of 1864; the rise of a strongman in Ger- many ; the decline of administrative ability in France ; the growing influence upon the emperor of corrupt and selfish adventurers, who sought wealth and power at his expense, — all tended to weaken and unmask him, even while he was possessed by his own pride, and sought to blind the people in the old imperial Roman way, by beautifying Paris, and 266 THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. emphasizing the splendors of his court. In the summer of 1 867, during the great International Exhibition at Paris, he entertained the princes and potentates of Europe ; and in that splendid "show year" the Emperor Napoleon III. seemed, like his wonderful uncle in 18 10, to have "attained the pinnacle of human greatness." But a "pinnacle " is a very "teeterish " place to stand on, as the Emperor Napo- leon in due time discovered, and as John Hay, studying events in Paris, prophetically expressed it : " For an CEdipus-People is coming fast With swelled feet limping on, If they shout his true name once aloud His false, foul power is gone. Afraid to fight and afraid to fly. He cowers in an abject shiver; The people will come to their own at last — God is not mocked forever." On the other side of the Rhine a growing and unifying power was gradually crowding upon France. A man was there rising to leadership who was destined to make Prussia great and Germany united, and whose indomitable will and " clear perception " of his country's needs were to usher in a new era in the history of Germany, of Europe, and the world ; for in October, 1862, Count Otto Von Bismarck was made prime minister of Prussia and minister of foreign affairs; while in 1867 he became Chancellor of the North German Confederation and the chief figure in the monu- mental plan of a greater and united Germany. The North German Confederation was a union for mutual protection of all the German States north of the Main, and was one of the results of the Austro-Prussian war of 1866, sometimes called the " Seven Weeks' War " for it was HOW LIBERTY AND UNION CAME. 267 begun, waged, and ended within that brief space of time ; Prussia then and thus put an end to the long rivalry of Austria in German affairs, and came from it victor, leader, and organizer. Austria had helped Prussia wrest from Denmark the Schleswig-Holstein territory, in the war of 1864; then they quarrelled over the spoils ; the war of words grew to a war of deeds ; and the German States — North and South — divided into two parties, as in America, though on a question of leadership rather than of slavery. Austria de- clared that she was the upholder of '* the freedom, power, and integrity of the whole German Fatherland ; " Prussia also declared that the Fatherland was in danger from the designs of Austria, "faithless and regardless of treaties." And then, north and south, the rival factions of Germany sprang at each other's throats. In 1864 a German inventor had produced a breech-load- ing musket known as the Prussian needle-gun. That terrible invention won the war against Austria within seven weeks. The South German armies could not withstand the withering fire of the deadly needle-gun backed up by powerful artillery ; the battle of Sadowa, in June, 1866, was an Austrian defeat, and the actual war campaign of seven days led to the triumph of Prussia and the treaty of Prague. This treaty gave to Prussia all that she demanded. To her ally, Italy, it gave Venice, and other Austrian posses- sions in Italy ; it excluded Austria from the German Union, and brought about the North German Confederation of 1867, with Prussia as the head of the league and Count Bismarck as its directing hand. The treaty of Prague, although it said nothing of the 268 THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Emperor of France, was the signal for the death-knell of Napoleon III. The success of Prussia meant the downfall of the empire in France. Because he had kept his hands off in the conflict with Austria, Napoleon suggested to Prussia that he should be rewarded by a few frontier towns for being so good and friendly. " Not a single foot of German soil," Bismarck replied ; and Napoleon, again disappointed, began to scheme anew. He had met an opponent before whom he was but a child; but like a child, he went headlong into folly. How far the spirit of American nationalism and the success of America's dominant sovereignty affected the other nations of the world we may not estimate ; few of them perhaps would acknowledge this influence; but there can be little doubt that the forward movement in the American republic, from the Revolution that gave it birth to the conflict that tested it and the acts that have made it, at the close of the Nineteenth Century a great world- power, has had an incalculable influence upon the attitude and development of other nations. This influence, conscious or unconscious, which found its highest expression in Abraham Lincoln, displayed itself not only in the remarkable growth of emigration from Europe to America, but in the trend of thought and action in Europe. Great men, wrought upon by this American idea of freedom, sought to ingraft upon European thought a modified democracy or a finer spirit of union. In England, John Bright, upon whom had fallen the mantle of Richard Cobden as a moral reformer, sought to make reform practical and helpful to his fellow-countrymen. HOW LIBERTY AND UNION CAME. 269 He has been called the "modern representative of the ancient tribunes of the people ; " having " as his password and his political livelihood " the welfare of the common people ; "full of faith that popular instincts are both morally right and intellectually sound " — the faith that Abraham Lincoln had. In France, Adolph Thiers, champion of liberalism in politics, constantly arraigned the imperialism of Louis Napoleon, charging him with being the enemy and betrayer of the French people, while his vigorous denun- ciation of the emperor's Mexican policy found expression in a warning of danger to the state which was scarcely short of prophetic. In Italy, Cavour's influence, even though the great statesmen had gone, still swayed the actions of the liberal and determined unionist Victor Em- manuel, even when the ill-timed folly of the radical unionist Garibaldi, in 1867, almost plunged Italy in a new war; while in Spain, that noble republican, Emilio Castelar, " a pure and intelligent statesmen," as Edward Everett Hale calls him, in a land whose people, through centuries of despotism, had been trained to regard monarchy with superstitious reverence, strove to lead his fellow countrymen into the broader spirit of national independence. His work was unconsciously fostered by the unprincipled and unpopular Queen Isabella, who, in a reign torn by fac- tion and intrigue, lost first the respect, and then the confi- dence, of her subjects, and in 1868 was driven from her throne by a popular revolution, led by Marshal Serrano and General Prim, and fostered by Castelar. The latter would have attempted a repubhc, but the military leaders preferred a constitutional monarchy ; and, unable to decide upon any native prince capable of ruHng, they went into 270 THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. the "foreign market" for a king, first offering the crown to a German, Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern, a relative of King William of Prussia. This choice angered the Emperor Napoleon and his un- wise advisors, who claimed to see, in this invitation to a German prince, the interference of Germany in European affairs, and especially in those of the Latin countries, of whom Napoleon had determined to be the recognized leader and head. He saw no way of counteracting this North German influence save by war ; and secretly, but determinedly, he set about preparing for this crisis, and forcing Germany into the offensive. The wisdom of national union which was being worked out in Germany, and also in Italy, where Victor Emmanuel was gradually bringing the whole Italian peninsula, includ- ing even the papal territory of Rome itself, into a complete and consistent union, was seen also in Austria. There, what has been described as "a judicious readiness to acquiesce in accomplished facts," led the Emperor of Aus- tria, stunned by the shock of Sadowa, to consent to the advance proposed by his new and more liberal prime min- ister, Baron Beust, in 1867, and grant constitutional liberty to Hungary, and, by pronounced concessions, to allay the discontent in other divisions of the empire. In June, 1867, the Emperor and Empress of Austria were crowned at Pesth as king and queen of Hungary ; and Francis Deak, the old-time friend and comrade of the patriot Kossuth, not only saw in this union of the " dual kingdoms " a result of his own exertions through years of discouragement, but was himself recognized as an important factor in the pacifi- cation and unity of Austria. HOW LIBERTY AND UNION CAME. 2/1 All these movements marked a distinct advance ; but the years just preceding 1870 marked, also, a distinct advance in other than political and national measures. The world was being made anew by the march of invention, improve- ment, and neighborliness. In March, 1865, the first direct telegram from India was received in England ; the East and West were thus brought into instantaneous touch; and the successful laying of the Atlantic cable, in the summer of 1866, after five unsuccessful attempts, joined the Old world and the New, and was the beginning of that vast enterprise in submarine telegraphy, which to-day seams the oceans and deep waters of the world with one hundred and fifty thousand miles of cable. More direct and quicker means of communication between Europe and the East were also secured, at the same time, by the successful completion of the Suez Canal. Through the narrow neck of land that separates Africa from Asia, and divides the waters of the Mediterranean and Red Seas, human ingenu- ity for nearly twenty-five hundred years, since the days of the Pharaoh Necho, had been endeavoring to cut a ditch for joining the waters of Europe and Asia — the Indian and Atlantic oceans. This was done at last, after ten years of labor in the shifting sand of Egypt, by an enter- prising and indomitable Frenchman, Ferdinand de Les- seps. In February, 1867, the first ship worked its way through the uncompleted canal; and on the seventeenth of November, 1869, the work was pronounced complete, and the Suez Canal was formally opened by the Khedive of Egypt and representatives of all the kingdoms of Europe, when a fleet of fifty vessels sailed through the ninety miles of canal, — "a gala day for all commercial nations." 2/2 THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. The year that witnessed the formal opening of the Suez Canal, witnessed also the completion of another link in world-connection. This was the Pacific railroad, the first direct route of steam communication across America, begun in November, 1865, and completed in May, 1869. The distance from Omaha to San Francisco, thus bridged by this great railroad enterprise, was nearly two thousand miles ; and the connection by rail between Omaha and New York completed the direct service in a railroad stretching over more than three thousand miles of plain and prairie, mountain and river, a gigantic engineering enterprise that opened up, to occupation and development, the wide and wonderful regions of "the Far West." This practical development of the United States by suc- cess in authority, growth, commercial expansion, and domestic vigor, as displayed between 1865 and 1870 in the triumph of the Union in 1865, in the acquisition by pur- chase, in 1 867, of Russian America, now known as Alaska, in the wonderful growth of trade and manufacture, and the foreign and interstate commerce after the success of the ocean cable and the overland railroad, led other Eng- lish-speaking peoples to consolidate and unite. On May first, 1867, the Dominion of Canada was proclaimed as the formal union, under one joint confederation, of the British provinces of North America ; into this confederation, how- ever, Newfoundland declined to enter ; but in 1 869 the territory of the great northern syndicate, known as the Hudson's Bay Company, was ceded to the British crown. And in 1870 this territory was incorporated in the Domin- ion, to be followed later by British Columbia, the North- west Territory, and Manitoba, the only protest to this HOW LIBERTY AND UNION CAME. 2/3 action being the armed insurrection of the French element, which for more than a hundred years had chafed under the results of the defeat of Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham. The Canadian half-breed, Louis Riel, who led this Red River rebellion, was, however, defeated in 1870, and Canada was practically a united dominion of the Brit- ish Empire. The success of federation in Canada led at last to a closer union of the colonies of the crown, fostered by concessions and aid from the wise queen of England ; and the colonial possessions of Great Britain grew and strengthened with the years. Thus was another result of American manhood and enterprise exhibited to the world ; for the home-rule system of colonial government was the direct outcome of the American Revolution, and the crown of Great Britain had learned wisdom by experience. As Mr. Mackenzie, the Englishman, declares, " the vast folly of 1776 will not be repeated." A conservative reformer was at the helm in England. William Ewart Gladstone was prime minister, with so strong a support behind him as to enable him to uproot abuses and reform methods as had never before been pos- sible ; and the redress of the wrongs that still clung to the English state and the English church began vigorously in 1869 and 1870. But, with reforms, the demands of those most benefited grow. The workers protested against the despotism of society ; the regeneration of labor was demanded ; and, out of many grievances, by many unwise methods, much fanatical friction, and many threats of revolution, finally emerged in 1866 the first united revolt of labor. Germany and France had led in these unwise attempts at forcible readjustment, while the open 274 THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. antagonism between labor and capital led all governments to appreciate and seek to curb the advance of those ultra reformers known under the general name of Socialists. The more violent of these " social reformers " openly- declared that the triumph of their principles was only to be obtained "by the violent overturning of all existing social order ; " and the plan upon which they would "reorganize " the world was based upon such staggering demands as : no rent for land ; no inheritance of property ; no home prop- erty for those who left it for other lands ; a single direct tax ; compulsory labor for all ; free education ; national ownership of banks, methods of transportation, manufac- tures, and agriculture. This would indeed have overturned society ; and the great middle class, which is the strength and sinew of all lands, did not take kindly to the idea. But the laboring classes did believe in anything that would give them less work and more money ; so, one of the earliest outgrowths of this demand for the "emancipation of labor" was the formation of trade and labor unions and the united protest of what are known as " strikes." The leader and chief agitator of this labor upheaval was a German socialist, resident in London, named Karl Marx. In 1 866 a congress of delegates of the " International Association of Laborers," meeting in Geneva in Switzer- land, under the directing guidance of Karl Marx, declared that "the emancipation of the laboring class must be accomplished by the laboring class itself, and must be ac- complished in every country where modern society exists." It also recommended the organization of workingmen against the "intrigues of capitalists," the investigation of HOW LIBERTY AND UNION CAME. 275 the conditions of the working-classes throughout the world ; the co-operation of workingmen in producing the results of their own labor, and the abolition of standing armies. This was the beginning of strikes and labor troubles, which first assuming formidable proportions in 1866 by- open-air meetings, processions, and organized resistance to capital, have disturbed the centres of trade, crippled pro- duction, antagonized capital, and terrorized unwilling com- rades through forty years of unrest, while, at the same time, reorganizing methods, shortening hours of labor, establishing improved methods of supply and demand, mak- ing capital less autocratic and labor more independent. So every reform, however hampered it may be by fanati- cism, extravagance, and revolt, must in time benefit more than it weakens, and help on the sure and steady progress of the world. The age of Abraham Lincoln, — the era of freedom, as we may call it, — which comprised the ten years from i860 to 1870, had done wonders for the world. Emancipation in America and Russia, independence in Italy, union in Germany and Austria, liberalism in France and Spain, democracy, under the lead of Gladstone in England, con- solidation in Canada, and a closer approach toward federa- tion by the progressive English colonies throughout the world — these all had been helped on by, if not indirectly resulting from, that uprising of the people against outworn theories and despotic claims which, inspired by the ques- tionable demands of reform, and led on by that greatest of progressive conservatives, Abraham Lincoln, had pushed on the world in a mighty stride toward freedom. While 2/6 THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. freeing labor from the shackles of time, and elevating pro- duction by advanced methods of creation and invention, it had prepared the real people to take their proper place as at once the makers of progress, the developers of power, the masters of ingenuity, and the civilizers of the world. " In giving the German people political unity Bismarck realized their strongest and deepest desire . . . and when, as he ex- pressed it, ' Germany was put in the saddle,' it made him a national hero." Munroe Smith. THE AGE OF BISMARCK. Unity. (1870-1880.) PRINCE yON BISMARCK (Otto Eduard Leopold), CREATOR OF THE GERMAN EMPIRE, Born Sch'diihausen, Prussia, April i, 1813, Died Friedrichsruh, Prussia, July so, i8(}S. CHAPTER XVI. WHEN THE WORLD READJUSTED ITSELF. {From 1870 to 187s ■) WHEN Giuseppi Garibaldi — "the lame lion of Ca- prera " as his admirers loved to call him, sought, with the radical reformer Mazzini, to unite Italy by revo- lutionary methods, his chief cry was, " Rome the capital of all Italy ! " Like all radical reformers. Garibaldi refused to listen to wisdom ; and when in 1867, with his insurgents, he invaded Roman territory, he was defeated at Mentana by the French soldiers, who were, with their bayonets, bolstering up the temporal power of the Pope. " Italy shall never enter Rome, No, never ! " declared the prime minister of the Emperor Napoleon ; and as, by treaty with France, King Victor Emmanuel was pledged not to interfere with the Papal dominion, it looked as if Gari- baldi's purpose and the desire of Cavour were not to be attained ; for almost the last words of the great Italian statesman were to the effect that Rome was the inevitable capital of United Italy. Cavour, rather than the minister of Napoleon, was the true prophet. North and south of the Papal power lay free and united Italy ; and every Italian in the Papal states, though a good Roman Catholic, was a better Italian, who, while acknowledging the spiritual sway of the Pope, denied his power as a temporal prince, and yearned for union with 279 28o THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Italy. But French occupation shut out Itahan posses^ sion. The inevitable, however, was to come in spite of the Emperor Napoleon. It was, indeed, to come because of him. The defeat of Austria in 1866, the formation of the North German Confederation that same year, and the mas- terly methods by which Bismarck made Prussia the leading power in Europe, wounded the pride of France, and forced Napoleon to attempt the crippling of Germany. He did this in his customary underhanded way. His agents sought, by stirring up the Eastern neighbors of Russia, to so occupy the Czar as to keep him from interference in the West, Then he tried to bind Italy and Austria to France in a triple alliance against Prussia ; but though it came to nothing, both France and Napoleon believed that the nation could, if need be, meet and defeat Germany single-handed. So when, in 1869, Spain, distracted by domestic troubles, offered its vacant throne to a German prince. Napoleon and the French government declared the negotiation a German plot ; and the Emperor ordered his minister at Berlin to demand from King William of Prussia that his relative, the German prince, should never accept the offer of the Spanish throne. King William, of course, refused. He declared he had nothing to say in the matter, and did not propose to mix up in the affair. Thus forced into action by the public sentiment of France, which seemed to demand that a stop should be put to Germany's growing power. Napoleon could not control the spirit he himself had raised ; and weakly yielding to the popular cry, on the nineteenth of July, 1870, he declared war against Germany. WHEN THE WORLD READJUSTED ITSELF. 28 1 It was not really so much the public sentiment of France that brought about this crisis as of the French army and the insistent people of Paris, perpetually dissatisfied and forever creating some new excitement. They quite over- ruled the soberer judgment of France, which already, by a growing minority, was criticising and opposing the disas- trous designs of Napoleon. " On to Berlin ! " rang the cry ; and the armies of both nations pushed east and west to the frontiers. The cam- paign that followed was brief, one-sided, and decisive. Ger- many, for the first time fighting as a united nation, was victorious from the start, thanks to the effective measures of Bismarck and the masterly generalship of Von Moltke. The great army upon which Napoleon relied to conquer Prussia was mostly on paper ; the million men he had ex- pected to lead dwindled to less than two hundred and fifty thousand ; and if ever an army showed " unpreparedness " it was that with which the Emperor Napoleon in 1870 set out to face the perfectly equipped German army of four hundred thousand men. The issue was never in doubt : from the battle of Worth, on the sixth of August, 1870, to the surrender at Sedan, on the second of September, victory was always with the Ger- mans. Napoleon was sent as a prisoner to the German castle at Wilhelmshoe ; and two days after, on the fourth of September, 1870, his empire fell, his ambitious empress was fleeing to England, and for the third time the French Republic was proclaimed. " Down with the Empire ! Long live the Republic ! " shouted the same fickle multitude that had cried " On to Berlin!" and "Long live the Emperor ! " but two months 282 THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. before; and then, speedily, the republic itself was fighting for life. The German army advanced on Paris ; the city was defended by the volunteers with a resistance that sur- prised the German invaders. For four months the German besiegers were held at bay ; the German demands for sur- render were refused ; and not until two French armies of re-enforcement and relief were overthrown did the brave defenders of Paris yield to the inevitable, and surrender to the German besiegers on the twenty-eighth of January, 1 87 1. And thus fell the Empire of Napoleon the Little. Meantime France's necessity was Italy's opportunity. German victories called the French garrison from Rome ; and when Sedan toppled over Napoleon, the army of Victor Emmanuel assaulted and captured "the imperial city;" the secular power of the Pope was abolished ; and Rome, by a vote of one hundred and thirty thousand to fifteen hundred, united itself to the kingdom of Italy, of which, since the first of July, 1871, it has been the capital. The overthrow of Napoleon cemented a still stronger nationality. Above the renewed patriotism of the Mar- seillaise swelled the deeper and ever-growing volume of the " Watch on the Rhine," as the sons of the Fatherland avenged in 1870 the disaster of 1807, and the son of Queen Louise of Prussia held in captivity the person and the pal- ace of the nephew of the man who had humiliated his mother. And in that captured palace at Versailles, on the eighteenth of January, 1870, in the presence of the sover- eign princes and the representatives of the free cities of Germany, William, king of Prussia, was proclaimed and crowned William I., Emperor of Germany, and German unity had been effected at last. WHEN THE WORLD READJUSTED ITSELF. 283 But German unity was born almost in the throes of French anarchy. Defeated, dispirited, and crushed, France, through its veteran patriot, Thiers, on the twenty-sixth of February, 1871, agreed to the peace of Versailles, as im- posed by the imperious Bismarck. By this she surrendered to Germany the Rhine provinces of Alsace and Lorraine (five thousand square miles of territory and a million and a half inhabitants), and agreed to pay to Germany one billion dollars as indemnity for making war. This peace was rati- fied on the tenth of May following, by the treaty of Frank- fort on the Main, by which, as the results of the Franco- German war of 1870, the military power of France was destroyed, a new western boundary for Germany was forced from France, and the political unity of Germany was ac- knowledged and realized. Before all this was completed, however, anarchy and ter- ror once more held the unfortunate city of Paris in their grip. On the eighteenth of March, 1871, the agitators, radicals, revolutionists, and socialists in Paris denied the new republic's right to surrender, and barricading the city, declared the rule of the Commune — the people — estab- lishing on the ruin of the empire the rule of the armed mob, which very nearly desolated the beautiful city, and was only suppressed on the twenty-eighth of May by the bombardment, assault, and capture of the city by the com- bined forces of the army of the republic and her German conquerors. Upon this final overthrow, the third Republic of France rose to power. The veteran Thiers, patriot, and firm oppo- nent of Napoleon, was elected president ; and the nation set itself so nobly and heroically to keep the treaty with Ger- 284 THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. many, that, to the astonishment of the world, before the time hmit fixed by the treaty, the whole of the vast obliga- tions to Germany had been fulfilled, and " the heel of the conqueror " was removed from French territory. It was another instance of the indomitable will of the people, so often displayed in the vigorous Nineteenth Century. The downfall of Napoleon, the rise of the French Re- public, the establishment of the German Empire, and the unity of England, well characterized by an English observer as "the astonishing events of 1870," affected the whole of Europe, and changed the relations that had been so long based upon rivalry and antagonisms to a condition of " pro- found peace" — a peace which continued for years in Europe, and led all nations to acknowledge the leadership and masterly ability of the great man of the age, Bismarck, the power behind the throne in Germany. This remarkable man — the creator of German unity — applied himself to the work of making Germany strong and great as well as united. "The unity of Germany," he had declared in 1862, "is to be brought about, not by speeches nor by the votes of majorities, but by blood and iron." Proceeding upon that "stalwart" and often terrible creed of power by force, Bismarck had overturned European politics. He established the German empire "under the military predominance of Prussia ; " he made Germany the leading power of Europe; because of his methods, the Napo- leonic Empire had been finally overthrown, Italy was united, and the temporal power of the Pope destroyed ; the first enduring republic in France had been established, and the foreign policy of Europe completely altered ; methods and WHEN THE WORLD READJUSTED ITSELF. 285 systems of war were changed ; while, because of the very force that Bismarck had proclaimed as necessary to the de- fence and protection of nations, peace rather than war has been adopted as the thing to strive for ; and public senti- ment, educated by representative assemblies and the power of the press, has to a great extent, as Professor Seignobos declares, " paralyzed the personal will of sovereigns and ministers, and put more pressure on governments to keep them from war." In September, 1872, the Emperors of Germany, Austria, and Russia with their ministers met at Berlin, and pledged themselves to maintain the peace of Europe, and especially to keep France from war. " Europe recognizes the German Empire as the bulwark of general peace," Bismarck declared ; and in thus isolating France and England from the rest of Europe, the great chancellor displayed his ability, statesmanship, and power. France, however, though storing up a sleeping vengeance against her conqueror, Germany, needed all her strength to rebuild and strengthen her own edifice without seeking a new war ; and England, great at home and abroad, had little wish to mix up in the confusing caldron of European poli- tics. In commerce and industry Great Britain, in 1870, ruled supreme. Under the lead of Gladstone, peace was the main object of the United Kingdom, — peace and com- mercial development; and he who has been called "the greatest living master of finance," safely steered his country through all the dangers of home and foreign disturbance to the proud position of the leading force in the Christianizing and civilizing of the world. Of course, good Americans may be inclined to dispute 286 THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. this pre-eminence ; but, like France, the Republic of the United States had too much to occupy herself at home in healing the wounds and covering the scars of civil war to assume any position of leadership beyond her ocean borders. These borders in 1870 were stronger and better de- veloped than ever. The supremacy of the American mer- chant marine had, indeed, been lost in the waste of civil war ; but the internal improvement and domestic growth of the great American Republic were astonishing. In railways and manufactures, in crops and productions, this growth was steady and enormous, while the commercial interests at home and abroad, after the close of the civil war, increased mightily. In the five years between 1870 and 1875 the ex- ports and imports more than doubled in value over those of the five years between i860 and 1865 ; in each case — ex- ports as well as imports — the totals crowded the limit of three billions of dollars ; while, for the corresponding periods of five comparative years, immigration into the United States increased nearly threefold — the total of " new citizens" from abroad between 1870 and 1875 reaching nearly to two millions. Guided by the misfortunes of the United States because of uncertain confederation, state sovereignty, and diverse laws, the new Dominion of Canada centralized its power in its parliament at Ottawa, which set the limits of the duties and powers of the different Provincial assemblies. At the head of the Dominion stood the governor-general, appointed for a term of five years by the queen. But the governor-general is scarcely a political power ; he can do nothing without the consent of his council, which, in its turn, is responsible to the people ; senators and judges WHEN THE WORLD READJUSTED ITSELF. 287 are appointed for life ; and Canada's provincial government, thanks to the American Revolution and England's increase in wisdom, is the most stable and nearest perfection of any possible colonial government. It is, indeed, but a short step from this confederation to national independence, should the Dominion ever desire it. On the southern side of the American border the repub- lics of Central and South America were slowly feeling their way to stability. Security comes haltingly when passion is mistaken for patriotism, and the countrymen of Bolivar and San Martin had not yet schooled themselves in the calmer methods of liberty. Political and sectarian differ- ences provoked both feud and faction, and the ruling power was not always the recognized one ; revolts and revolutions were frequent ; and the growth of the southern republics in self-government was retarded by the atmos- phere of passion and the environments of suspicion, in which the twin oak-trees of liberty and law can never flourish sturdily. The foremost South American of this period of unrest was Domingo Sarmiento of Buenos Ayres. Realizing that the greatest civilizer was education, and that upon the future rather than the past depended the progress of his race, this philanthropic statesman devoted his life to eman- cipating South America from ignorance, superstition, and greed. It was not an easy task. Throughout South Amer- ica presidents were dictators, and dictators were tyrants ; but Sarmiento, through many discouragements, defeats, and dangers, held steadily to his purpose. Envy and slander could not dull his enthusiasm ; exile and injustice could not stay his endeavors. The Argentine Republic at last 288 THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. elected him its president in 1865, and his administration of four years is known as the " golden age " of Argentina. The other South American republics in time followed his methods, if not his lead ; and, gradually, the " real army of liberation" — the farmers, the artisans, and the school- masters of South America — began the thankless but glori- ous task of redeeming and uniting the races which Spain for so many years had held in thrall. In this enfranchisement, Anglo-Saxon and German en- terprise, as well as native energy, has borne a mighty share; and Wheelwright and Meiggs and Lowe, leaders in material and industrial growth, are more to be remem- bered as benefactors of South America than Francia, Lopez, and Rosas, — tyrants and dictators, — whose selfish ambitions well nigh crippled the progress of their home- land. In Mexico, the northern outpost of Spanish America, three hundred revolutions tell the stormy story of an advance toward true national freedom, which began at last, when, in 1874, the amended liberal constitution was ac- cepted as the organic law of the republic, and the rise of Porfirio Diaz led the way to order and prosperity. Brazil, a sort of absolute constitutional empire, if one can understand so manifest an anomaly, was held in peace and power by the wise judgment and liberal rule of that bene- ficent monarch, Dom Pedro II., who in 1871 made his em- pire a free nation by the emancipation of every child born of slave parents and of all slaves held by the state. In this philanthropic advance Dom Pedro wisely recognized and accepted the liberal spirit of his day, even though his wisdom led to his own undoing ; for it was decreed by fate WHEN THE WORLD READJUSTED ITSELF. 289 that neither king nor emperor should long exist in the liberty-loving air of South America. The liberty-loving air of America was furnishing strength- ening ozone to other struggling lands. When, in 1835, the Dutch burghers, farmers, or " boers," of Cape Colony, dissatisfied with the liberal policy of Great Britain towards the black nations of Africa, went northward on their " exo- dus," or "great trek" as it was called, they laid the foun- dations of the Dutch repubhcs of Africa known as the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. In 1852 the Boers of the Transvaal secured their independence, and two years later the Orange Free State was established in its separate nationality. Both, however, were slave-holding republics, torn with dissensions, and so hostile to the growth of British power in South Africa that, finally, the peace of that whole "New World" was threatened, industry suffered, and the slave-trade flourished. At last England, in 1876, protested and finally acted ; but the sturdy stand for independence and nationality, even in the midst of feud and faction, showed how deeply the love of liberty was ingrained in the Dutch nature, which, stubbornly independent, has done so much for the personality of nations and of men. The persistence of Europe, however, was doing more in Africa than schooling the Boers in independence ; it was unlocking the mystery of the Dark Continent, and preparing the way for the regeneration and development of that un- known corner of the world. When David Livingstone, in 1856, had emerged from the unknown after an absence of sixteen years and a tramp of eleven thousand miles, he brought with him the key to Africa. For his report opened the eyes of the world to the commercial value of Africa as 290 THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. well as its spiritual needs, and explorer and missionary fol- lowed the path that Livingstone had blazed ; Du Chaillu the Frenchman ; Burton, Speke, and Grant, the English- men ; Rohefs and Von der Decken the Germans ; Baker and Walker and Reade the Englishmen ; Schweinfurth the Rus- sian ; Mohr and Nachtigal the Germans; Stanley the Ameri- can ; De Brazza the Italian; and Serpa Pinto the Portuguese, — had, in the twenty years between Livingstone's first re- ports and his own death "in the harness," discovered, ex- plored, and opened the way for commerce into the long locked regions of the oldest of civilized and latest of regen- "erated lands. From the days of the Phoenician explorers, seven hundred years before Christ, to those of Livingstone and Stanley, nineteen hundred years after Christ, Africa had remained a mystery; but by 1875 the genius and ro- mance of exploration, pushed forward by the restless energy of the Nineteenth Century, had opened the country to the eyes of the world, and the story of exploration grew into the story of occupation. By that date it was estimated that the twelve million square miles of African area sup- ported a population of at least two hundred millions of people ; and the nations of Europe disputed with the fol- lowers of Mahomet for occupation, interest, and influence. As the disappearance and loss of Livingstone in Africa led Stanley on his relief expedition, and opened a new era in African development, so in the Tartarean darkness and cold around the Pole, the loss of Sir John Franklin, in 1845, ^^'^ the forty relief expeditions sent out by England and America to seach for and succor him, led to the more determined exploration of the northern ice-bound seas. The introduction of steam into navigation rendered this WHEN THE WORLD READJUSTED ITSELF. 29I task somewhat easier; and the English expedition of 1875, when, with two powerful screw-steamers, Captain Nares forced his way through the ice floes to the very edge of the paleocrystic sea, and stormed the barriers of the vast Polar pack at the very highest northern altitudes yet reached by civilized man, was the advance of that modern polar discovery which, before the close of the Nineteenth Century, had very nearly forced the secrets of the Pole. So, too, the famous expedition of the " Challenger," under the same valiant Captain Nares, between the years 1872 and 1874, pushed into the lifeless regions of the Antarctic, and "challenged" its mysteries. The close of the third quarter of the investigating Nineteenth Century marked a mighty increase in the world's knowledge of its own hidden places and its own vast possibilities. What exploration was doing for geographical and an- thropological knowledge, science was equalling. By 1875 the results of seventy years of research, investigation, effort, and ingenuity, were telling mightily in production and improved methods. The two greatest forces of modern civilization, steam and electricity, had made and were mak- ing enormous strides towards practical perfection. Land and sea were crossed and zigzagged with railway tracks and steamship routes. The carrying facilities of the world were vastly increased ; and the telegraph system had grown to such useful proportions that, in the year 1870 alone, nearly fifty million " telegrams " were sent over the wires and cables of this wonderful electrical marvel. In other lines of human achievement the three-score years and ten of the century's life had wrought revolutions as notable and as valuable as were those which had remod- 292 THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. elled politics and remade states. It literature and art, in science and research, in learning and enlightenment, in a growing familiarity with great questions, and a deeper con- sciousness of vast possibilities, the whole world was broad- ening into a more intelligent productiveness, learning more clearly the how and the why, as well as the where and the when, of many a great world-problem or a long-hidden mys- tery. Nineteenth Century science has proved the " open sesame " to many a darkened treasure-cave. In 1870 more than one fearless investigator stood before the sealed door of the cave with the "open sesane " on his lips. Darwin, with his bold "Origin of Species," and still bolder " Descent of Man ; " Spencer, with his " Sociology " and his modern system of philosophy ; Tyndall, with his wonderful studies in heat and light, — actually stormed the treasure-house of nature, and "looted" it of mysteries and facts. In France, Renan, breaking away from what he deemed "the barrenness of the scholastic method," was startling the conventional, and upsetting old theories with a vigor and realism that were almost brutal in their bril- liancy ; while the struggle for political and national unity in Germany increased the numbers and influence of the students and thinkers of the Fatherland, to whose labors the people of Germany, loyal to their own, responded with a growing respect and a deepening conviction. In every civilized land the years between 1870 and 1875 displayed not only a growth of intellectual vigor in the producers, but a corresponding growth of appreciation in the people. It was in 1872 that Wagner settled at Bayreuth, and there founded the theatre in which he broke away from old methods, and revolutionized the dramatic music of the WHEN THE WORLD READJUSTED ITSELF. 293 world ; it was in 1876 that Emerson published his poems "Brahma" and "The Over Soul" — so packed with thought, as Professor Bates observes, "that to the thoughtless they seem nonsense;" and it was in 1873 that Carlyle, long neglected as a "freak," was sufficiently recognized by his contemporaries as to warrant the publi- cation of his complete works ; it was in 1873 that Walt Whitman, invalided by his self-sacrificing hospital work during the Civil War, retired in poverty to Camden, " will- ing," as he said, "to wait to be understood." And yet these four "freaks," or "fanatics," as unthinking people called them, are to-day acknowledged as moving powers in modern thought. More than any other man did Wagner directly influence "the music of the future;" Whitman, so John Burroughs declares, will be "an enormous feeder to the coming poetic genius of his country ; " while, as for those " twins of thought," Carlyle and Emerson, it may to-day be accepted that they were, as Mr. Garnett declares, " the two men who had the largest share in forming the minds from which the succeeding generation was to take its complexion." "Rarely," he adds "have nations been more fortunate in their instructors than the two great English-speaking peoples during the age of Carlyle and Emerson." "A man perfects himself by working," said Carlyle; "foul jungles are cleared away; fair seed fields rise in- stead, and stately cities ; and, withal, the man himself fast ceases to be jungle and foul unwholesome desert thereby." There was inspiration even for the thoughtless in this, as there was in the simple but stirring lines of Emerson : 294 THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. "The men are ripe of Saxon kind To build an equal state, — To take the stature from the mind, And make of duty fate. For He that worketh high and wise, Nor pauses in his plan, Will take the sun out of the skies Ere freedom out of man." In the heart of Europe, men not altogether of "Saxon kind," — a sturdy nation of mountaineers and farmers, — were holding their own in 1870, and "perfecting them- selves by working," were also making "of duty, fate," as they set an example in conservative freedom. "It would," says Professor Siegnobos, " be a mistake to measure the interest of Switzerland's history by the size of her territory. This little country fills a large place in the history of the existing institutions of Europe." The cantons of Switzer- land, indeed, furnish a practical example of what, in a land girdled by absolutism, or bordered by insurrection, popular sovereignty can accomplish ; for, through all the wars and revolutions, the overthrow of states, and the fall of dynas- ties since 18 14, the Swiss people have steadily held their own as the oldest existing republic. In 1874 a new and yet more liberal constitution was adopted by this liberty- loving people, which led to something unheard of in Europe — direct government by the citizens of the repub- lic ; a distinct advance ; for, as Professor Siegnobos de- clares, "no civilized people had yet gone so far in this path." Not even free America ; for there, in 1870 and 1875, the problem of reconstruction still hampered the work of politi- WHEN THE WORLD READJUSTED ITSELF. 295 cal enfranchisement, and created for over eight years — from 1868 to 1876 — what Doctor Edward Channing char- acterizes as "a period of political uncertainty." Grant, the great soldier of the Civil War, had, in 1868, been elected president of the United States ; he had been re-elected in 1872 ; and though he gave a vigorous and often statesman- like administration, the speculative spirit was abroad, and the growth of great fortunes, quickly made, and often as quickly dissipated, introduced a "new and serious feature into American life — the money-power. Cities, increasing rapidly, were careless of their finances, and greed and corruption tainted many a fair name. Unwise and short- sighted policy in the efforts to make men out of the enfranchised race led to persecution in the South and unreasoning criticism in the North, so that injustice and disorder had frequently to be met and punished. All reformatory work, however, is slow, and reconstruc- tion and security had to struggle with terrorism and fac- tion ; but, gradually, a better state of things was evolved, and by 1875 the nation had not only accepted but indorsed the methods for cementing anew the lasting union of the American Republic. Abroad, the republic grew in strength and importance ; and when by arbitration, in 1871, the Treaty of Washington amicably settled the unforgotten grudge against England for her open aid to the Confederate States, and through the Emperor of Germany, the northwestern boundary dis- pute with England was settled in favor of the United States, the world awoke to the real importance and strength of the great new power across the western sea. Thus were the people of Saxon blood — the three great 296 THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Anglo-Germanic nations of the world — drawing nearer to- gether. Bismarck, the guiding hand of Germany, the typical man of this age of union through strength, was instrumental in thus arbitrating the disputes of England and America, while, at the same time, unifying and strengthening the Empire by his process of national evolution. That process led in 1872 to a direct and open rupture with the Roman Catholic Church, a complicated struggle between the be- lievers in Bismarck and the followers of the Pope, known now in German history as " the Culturkampf " — the fight for civilization. But in 1875 Bismarck won ; for in that year he declared that his "armor was complete," and by a union of forces with the liberals and the progressives he turned the tide his way, and organized the new empire on the broad national lines he had himself desired. "Bismarck's Party," as his opponents called the workers for real German unity, triumphed, and the foundations of empire were well and strongly laid by the strongest man of his day — the master mind of that Age of Unity — the decade between 1870 and 1880. §1 Q I 2 ^ < S Q .; CHAPTER XVII. THE LAST "ONE-MAN POWER " OF THE CENTURY. {From i8y^ to 1880.) OTTO VON BISMARCK, Chancellor and Prince of the Empire, — he had been made Prince Bismarck in 1 87 1, — fought and won in 1875 his struggle for civiliza- tion — the Culturkampf . He had firmly established the Empire, over-riding sometimes the desires and wishes of his "imperial master," William the Emperor. Things seemed to be going his way ; his statesmanship and power were recognized even by his opponents and enemies ; and he was easily, as the third quarter of the Nineteenth Century opened, the foremost man in the world. In spite of a cen- tury of democratic progress, it seemed as if absolutism and the one-man power had again fastened its firm grip on the world, and that German unity and nationality seemed to have been accomplished at the expense of German inde- pendence and manhood. There were, even in Germany, those who held this view ; and those who desired equality and freedom quite as much as German nationality began to agitate and organize. While Bismarck was waging his "Culturkampf" he was shrewd enough to see that the friends of freedom and equality were good allies for his side ; and he so favored for the moment the Liberal and Progressive parties, with whom he had really little sympathy, and even the Socialists whom 297 298 THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. he hated, as to give him strength and victory. But, when he had triumphed, he made few concessions to his hberal allies ; he rejected their demands for political power, strengthened the army, and passed stringent laws against all "opponents of the government." This action especially displeased the radical reformers of Germany, who were studying the affairs of the world, and believed that the equality and freedom of man was the spirit of the age. The Socialists of Germany, largely drawn from the working classes, under the guidance of able leaders, strengthened their organization, and boldly set themselves to fight the all powerful chancellor and prince. When he wished to check their agitation by laws against the liberty of the press, the usually willing parliament, or "Reichstag," of Germany would not agree ; but when some hot -heads and fanatics of the radical Socialists twice attempted the life of the old emperor, the opinions of the Reichstag changed, and Bismarck was able to get the upper hand again, and secure the passage of strong laws against " the subversive efforts of the Social Democrats." This was in 1878; and for a time, at least, the progress of sociahsm was checked. Then it was that Bismarck broke off from his liberal connections, and joined hands with the conservative and reactionary forces, even going back with them to certain of the old traditions of the despotic kings of Prussia, " assist- ing" rather than elevating the "most numerous and least instructed class," and endeavoring to make a paternal rather than a self-helpful government. In England, also, at this time, a similar reactionary policy seemed to be in the ascendant. The Liberal party, jinder the lead of Gladstone, lost for a time its control ; the Conserv- THE LAST "ONE-MAN POWER" OF THE CENTURY. 299 ative party, with its brilliant but unreliable chief, Disraeli — known, after 1876, as Lord Beaconsfield — came into power, and sought to establish three prime factors, hardly consistent in the democracy into which Great Britain had at last grown. These were the throne, the house of lords, and the Established Church. Disraeli admired Bismarck, and wished to play a similar part in English history. So he set out to accomplish this by increasing the national power of England, and, " in the name of British honor," to adopt a warlike policy which should undo the popular reforms of Gladstone. To divert attention from home matters, he followed the course of the two Napoleons, and sought for glory abroad. This he found in strengthening the union of the British col- onies with the crown, expanding the borders of the kingdom, and becoming head nurse to the " sick man " of Europe. His first step was to unite the parent nation and all its dependencies in one mighty and solid empire. Gladstone's policy tended toward a practical if not absolute separation of the colonies from the mother country, without affording a chance for "the American blunder of 1776." Disraeli's policy was to block all such attempts toward colonial inde- pendence by a unity of interests and a strengthening of ties. To accomphsh this, he sent the Prince of Wales on a visit to India in 1875 ; and in 1877 he had the queen duly proclaimed Victoria, " by the grace of God, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, and Empress of India." Thus did he attempt the Bismarck role, and establish the " unifi- cation " of England, while, by a vigorous and aggressive foreign policy, he gained the good-will of the colonies, and enlarged the borders of the empire. 300 THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. In one section of the vast empire, however, there was perpetual unrest. The "vigorous policy" of England, from the days of Strongbow and the Geraldines, hundreds of years back, had never been "vigorous" to the end, if absolute conquest were desired. Neither Henry the Eighth, Elizabeth, nor Cromwell, the most " vigorous " of English "pacificators," completed the work they had begun ; and Ireland, the western outpost of the home king- dom, gave to each new generation and to each change of ministry an unsettled problem. The successor of Emmet and O'Connell in the seventies was an Anglo-American brought up in Ireland, Charles Stewart Parnell, of County Wicklow. He took up, in 1875, the cause of Irish inde- pendence, and in 1879 ^^^ made leader of the Irish Home Rule party, pledged to the blockade of all English affairs, in and out of Parliament, until Ireland's wrongs had been recognized, and the Irish question settled. A defensive association, first started among the Irish peasants, was revived in 1877 as the " Irish Land League." In 1879 this had so grown as to extend over all Ireland, and was intended to limit the powers of the landlords in Ireland, and make of the peasants and farmers small landed proprietors, who were advised to stick to their farms on their own terms of rental, and not to give up until driven away by force. The Land League promised to stand behind the people, and help them fight the landlords. Very much of the money-help needed to support the Land League and strengthen the Irish cause came in the way of great contributions from Irish sympathizers in America, who might have been better employed in making themselves real Americans. In that rapidly growing THE LAST "ONE-MAN POWER" OF THE CENTURY. 301 country the imperilled union was again firmly established. Since 1871 all the States were represented in Congress; and by 1876, the centennial year, these States numbered thirty-eight, while the western territories, fast filling up with a sturdy and thrifty population, were also pressing on to statehood. With wealth and power and a mighty area of land ; with a steadily increasing population and a vast showing in national and intellectual progress, — the republic of the United States of America, after one hundred years of life, had triumphantly disproved the prophecy of that positive old despot, Frederick the Great, who, at the close of the American Revolution, had declared that no single republic could be held together in a territory so vast as that which extended from Maine to Georgia. " It will break into sections or give place to a monarchy," said the great Frederick, who, even though king " by divine right," was not, you see, infallible, and did not, as he thought, know everything. In 1876, after a century of struggle, effort, and achieve- ment, the United States of America had not split up into sections, and had not set up a king. Instead, the world saw, on the western shores of the Atlantic, a mighty republic, the home of liberty, equality, and fraternity, a land of peace and plenty, a monument of national success, which in that centennial year sent out an invitation to all the nations of the earth to come across the seas, and help it celebrate its hundredth birthday. " The world and his wife " accepted the cordial invitation ; and from the tenth of May till the tenth of November, 1876, there was held in the city of Philadelphia, where the 302 THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Declaration of Independence was signed, one of the great international exhibitions of the Nineteenth Century. It was the largest of the six International Exhibitions held since (and including) the first London Exhibition of 185 1. The buildings and grounds covered sixty acres; there were sixty thousand exhibitors ; and, during the one hundred and fifty-nine days of the exhibition, it was seen by ten million visitors. It did much to acquaint the world with the resources and possibilities of the great Republic ; it did more towards bringing together the scattered peoples of the world, and increasing that spirit of neighborliness which, in spite of political selfishness, wars, and feuds, is still resistlessly bringing nearer the federation of the world, while, best of all, it cemented in still stronger bonds the reunited sections of a once threatened Union. " The people of Montgomery, Alabama, the birthplace of the Confederate government, through its city council," so ran the message sent on July fourth, " extend a cordial and fraternal greeting to all the people of the United States, with an earnest prayer for the perpetuation of concord and brotherly feelings throughout the land." And, across the sea, from the grand-nephew and suc- cessor of that great Frederick who could see no endur- ing union for the Republic of 1776, came a significant greeting for the same glorious anniversary. It was from " William, by the grace of God, Emperor of Germany," etc., to Ulysses S. Grant, President of the United States. " Great arid good friend," it said, " it has been vouch- safed to you to celebrate the centennial festival of the day upon which the great Republic over which you preside THE LAST "ONE-MAN POWER" OF THE CENTURY. 3O3 entered the rank of independent nations. The purposes of its founders have by a wise application of the teachings of the history of the foundations of nations, and with in- sight into the distant future, been reahzed by a develop- ment without a parallel. To congratulate you and the American people upon the occasion affords me so much the greater pleasure, because, since the treaty of friendship which my ancestor of glorious memory, King Frederick II., who now rests with God, concluded with the United States, undisturbed friendship has continually existed between Germany and America, and has been developed and strengthened by the ever-increasing importance of their mutual relations, and by an intercourse becoming more and more fruitful in every domain of commerce and sci- ence. That the welfare of the United States and the friendship of the two countries may continue to increase is my sincere desire and confident hope." And it was countersigned "Von Bismarck," — the man of "blood and iron," the man who had established and would maintain nationality by force ; the man who scorned republicanism and detested democracy. The prophecy of Frederick the Great had indeed been sufficiently disproved by the message of his imperial descendant. " Fruitful in every domain of commerce and science," — thus had run the greeting of the Emperor of Germany. The year 1876 was indeed this; three-quarters of a cen- tury had culminated in a marvellous display of developed energies, and the " miracles of science," by which all the world was affected, and in whose wonder-working all na- tions had a share, seemed especially traceable to the achievements of American thought and effort. 304 THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. "The realm of scientific investigation," so said the Lon- don Times of that day, '* is actively occupied at present by our American cousins, and with results simply astounding." It was at the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia that these marvellous possibilities were first fully realized, and that those " four new wonders of the world," — the electric light, the telephone, the phonograph, and the microphone, were either practically demonstrated or positively out- outlined. Inexhaustible light, instantaneous communica- tion of sound, the preservation of actual speech, the intensifying of almost inaudible sounds — these were the " four new wonders " that were given to the world between 1875 and 1880; and their practical utilization revolution- ized the methods of world-communication, and displayed the electricity which 1800 knew only as a toy, as the real and coming force of the world. And for much of this discovery, development, and adaptation, America is re- sponsible. In something more than material affairs was the world making progress in those "three-quarter " years. In 1875 France adopted a new constitution, admirably suited to a people of the peculiar nature of the French. It was a con- servative compromise between republicanism and royalty — or the organization, as it has been termed, of a constitutional monarchy, in which a president elected for seven years holds the position of a constitutional king, acting through a ministry appointed by himself, but personally responsible to the representative assembly of the republic. In 1878 Americanized Japan, which had, only as late as 187 1, aboHshed its old feudalism of the dark ages, took steps to make itself, like England, a constitutional mon- THE LAST "ONE-MAN POWER" OF TH'E CENTURY. 305 archy, establishing local elective assemblies, with rights of petition, extending the franchise to all men over twenty-one who could pay a land-tax of five dollars, and set about se- curing for itself constitutional freedom, a national assembly, and the highest forms of civilized government. In 1876 Spain, resting from the exhausting struggle of factional strife, followed the lead of Cavour and Bismarck, and declared for "the Constitutional Unity of Spain." The desires of Castelar the republican were not suited to unrepublican Spain ; the military dictatorship of the sol- dier Serrano pleased neither republican nor monarchist. A king was called for, but he must be neither despot nor feudal lord ; he must be a constitutional and a liberal king. So, following the spirit of the age, a constitution was adopted in 1876. A king was selected in the person of the son of the exiled Isabella ; and Alfonso XII., recognized as the constitutional king, ascended the throne of Spain as the head of the new condition of affairs. Portugal, too, in 1877, achieved a conservative regeneration of its govern- ment, extending the right of suffrage and permitting the representation of minorities. But the long-considered union with Spain has not yet been effected. Electoral reforms and constitutional methods also, about this same time, went into effect in aristocratic Austria, where Bismarck's policy of nationalism was being attempted with the rival and warring elements of a factional and divided people. In 1876, however, the eastern borders of Austria were disturbed by a determined effort on the part of the Christian dependencies of Turkey to break away from their Mohammedan masters. The " Sick Man of Europe" began to grow very sick indeed about 1875. 306 THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. The Turkish debt grew larger, money became scarcer, and the " Subhme Porte " (that odd title of a gate on a dock which has been taken by Turkey as its official name) was practically bankrupt. An increase of taxes roused certain of the Christian departments of Turkey to rebellion. In- surrection first broke out in 1875, in Herzegovina, one of the northwestern border provinces of the Sultan. In May, 1876, the peasants of Bulgaria revolted, and the powers of Europe demanded that Turkey reform her ways. Mean- time, the Turks themselves were splitting into parties. A new generation of progressive Turks, popularly known as "Young Turkey," declared that the Sultan was respon- sible to the people for his actions ; and if he did not reign legally, he should be deposed. This alarmed the Sultan. He made one of the leaders of the " Young Turkey " party grand vizier — Midhat Pasha, a man who was almost a statesman; and in December, 1876, a constitution, which was solemnly proclaimed to be " the property of all Otto- man subjects," was actually drafted and promulgated ! It provided for a cabinet and a parliament, such as the more progressive European nations had established, and gave to the Turkish empire, so it was declared, " the reign of lib- erty, justice, equality, and the triumph of civilization." It almost seemed as if the spirit of the Nineteenth Cen- tury had penetrated even the darkness of absolute Turkey ! But while doing this, and attempting to put down the revolution in Herzegovina, the scum of the Turkish army was turned loose upon the rebels in Bulgaria, and a cam- paign of massacre followed which roused Europe and America to horror and protest. Three of the powers of Europe, — Russia, Austria, and THE LAST "ONE-MAN POWER" OF THE CENTURY. 307 Germany, — after a conference at Berlin, presented a " memorandum " of reforms to the Sublime Porte, which the Sultan's council refused to accept because, so it was asserted, they were " contrary to the Constitution ! " Then Midhat Pasha was "discharged;" and as Turkey seemed going back to its old ways, the European powers threat- ened, in March, 1877, to abandon Turkey to her own devices, but to take from her all her Christian provinces. This was Russia's scheme, England, alone, objected to it, because it meant Russia's supremacy, and peril to Eng- land's possessions in the East. But, after long discussion, it was practically adopted ; and when Russia backed up its demands by a war with Turkey (in which the siege of Plevna in Bulgaria, in 1877, was the most important happening), the Sultan gave in, and by the Peace of San Stefano, dictated by victorious Russia and the Congress of Berlin, in 1878, renounced his sovereignty over nearly all the Christian states tributary to him in Europe. This Congress of Berlin, however, materially modified Russia's demands at San Stefano, as the dismemberment of Turkey there proposed seemed all too favorable to Rus- sia ; and Russia was, as it had been since the downfall of the great Napoleon, his successor as a menace to Europe. Prince Bismarck was president of the Congress of Berlin ; Beaconsfield was the English representative ; and these two men dominated the Congress, curbed and cut down Rus- sia's share in "the Turkish land-grab," and gave to Aus- tria the right of occupation and virtual suzerainty which Russia had coveted. " Young Turkey " was for the time defeated; and the strong man of Europe, Bismarck, the genius of his age, had again won a triumph in nationality, 308 THE STORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. by fostering a union of the Christian nations of the Balkan Peninsula, " We want permission to build churches ; we want a bishop of our own race ; we want schools ; we want taxes fixed ; we do not want soldiers in our houses ! " Thus had run the petition addressed to western Europe by the Christian mountaineers of Herzegovina, who had started this Turkish overthrow of 1875. "I, Khame, king of the Bagamangwato, greet Victoria, the great Queen of the Eng- lish," ran the petition of the African chief to England, in 1876. " I ask her majesty to pity me, and to hear what I write, quickly. The Boers are coming into my country, and I do not like them. They sell us and our children. The custom of the Boers has always been to cause people to be sold, and to-day they are still selling people." So, from two far-separated and utterly distinct persecuted peoples, came the cry to Europe for relief. And Europe heeded it. The Christians of the Balkans were liberated ; and England, in 1877, annexed the Transvaal, put a stop to Dutch civil war in South Africa, and saved the native Africans from the curse of slavery. The Congress of Berlin, which in June, 1878, settled for the time all the perplexing problems of the Eastern Ques- tion, settled another thing for the time being. It showed that Germany's influence was "preponderant" in Europe. And in 1880 Germany was Bismarck. He had raised his country to its greatest height of glory ; he had united, developed, and advanced her from a loose and shifting confederacy of jealous and often warring states to an imperial and undivided nation ; he had defeated in succession Austria, France, and Russia ; he had triumphed THE LAST "ONE-MAN POWER" OF THE CENTURY. 309 in the dismemberment of Turkey ; stamped down the rising threat of Socialism ; emerged victorious from his Cidtur- kampf — his "fight for civihzation," — and in 1877, on the heights of the Niederwald, overlooking the redeemed and reconquered Rhine, where Arminius, earliest of Ger- man patriots, had, ages before, overthrown the legions of the invading Romans, he had laid the foundation of that glorious national monument which commemorates German valor, German triumph, German redemption, German unity, and German greatness. And in 1880 the greatest of all Germans, of all Europeans, indeed, was the statesman Otto Von Bismarck, creator of German unity. " TolstoVs purpose is mainly to make others realize that religion, that Christ, is for this actual world here, and not /or some potential world elsewhere. . , . In any event, his endeavor /or a right li/e cannot be /or gotten. Even as a pose, if •we are to think so meanly o/ it as that, it is by /ar the tnost impressive spectacle o/ this century. . . . IVe m7