[Footnote 1:  Alison Phillips, Modern Europe, p. 8.]

Yet, when all is said, the Congress of Vienna represents an important milestone along the road of progress.  It is a great precedent.  As a disillusioned contemporary admitted, it “prepared the world for a more complete political structure; if ever the powers should meet again to establish a political system by which wars of conquest would be rendered impossible and the rights of all guaranteed, the Congress of Vienna, as a preparatory assembly, will not have been without use."[1] There is a prophetic ring about this, very welcome to us of the twentieth century.  We cannot think altogether unkindly of our great-grandfathers’ ill-judged attempt to avert the calamity which has now broken over us.

[Footnote 1:  Friedrich von Gentz, quoted in Camb.  Mod.  Hist. vol. x. p. 2.]

Nor was the Congress altogether barren of positive result; for it gave birth to that conception of a “Confederation of Europe,” which, though never realised, has been one of the guiding ideas of nineteenth-century politics.  As this solution of the world’s problems is likely to be urged upon us with great insistency at the conclusion of the present war, it will be well to look a little more closely into it and to see why it failed to secure the allegiance of Europe a hundred years ago.  The Congress had met at Vienna and settled all outstanding questions, to the satisfaction of its members; why should it not meet periodically, and constitute itself a supreme international tribunal?  The question had only to be asked to receive the approbation of all concerned.  The dreamer, Alexander I., at once saw the destinies of the world entrusted to a Holy Alliance, which would rule according to “the sacred principles of the Christian religion”; and even the more practical mind of Castlereagh conceived that a council of the great powers, “endowed with the efficiency and almost the simplicity of a single State,” was a possibility.

Yet, it is quite clear to-day that, at that time and under those conditions, the establishment of a permanent and effective Confederation of Europe would have proved disastrous to the world.  The Congress of Vienna was followed by further congresses in 1818, 1819, 1820, and 1822; and each succeeding conference revealed to Europe more clearly the true character of the new authority into whose hands the power was slipping.  Certain very dangerous tendencies became, for example, apparent.  The first conference had assembled to confer the blessings of order upon a continent ravaged by the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars of France.  Hence the Confederation of Europe started life as a kind of anti-Jacobin society, whose main business it was to suppress revolution, whether it took the nationalistic or democratic form.  Furthermore, the interference with the internal affairs of France in 1814 and 1815 tended to establish a precedent for interference with the internal affairs of any country.