led them to break up the Concert of Europe in 1818—­“a system which not only threatened the liberties of others, but might, in the language of the orators of the Opposition, in time present the spectacle of Cossacks encamped in Hyde Park to overawe the House of Commons";[1] and, if the prevailing “internationalism” has not quite blinded their eyes to-day, they will scrutinise with the greatest possible care any new proposals to re-erect the Concert of Europe as a permanent and authoritative tribunal.  What the world needs at present is more nationalism and more democracy.  And it is only after these two great nineteenth-century movements have worked themselves out to the full, at least on the continent of Europe, that mankind will be able safely to make experiments towards the realisation of the third and crowning principle, the principle of a European Commonwealth.

[Footnote 1:  Cambridge Modern History, vol. x. p. 16.]

[Illustration:  EUROPE IN 1815]

The national problems which the Congress of Vienna bequeathed to posterity may be seen at a glance by looking at a political map of Europe in 1815.  The entire centre of the Continent from Ostend to Palermo, and from Koenigsberg to Constantinople, was left a political chaos.  And it is not too much to say that the history of Europe from 1814 to 1914 is the history of the settlement of this vast area.  The only State whose frontiers have not altered during this period is Switzerland, and even that country seized the opportunity which a disturbed Europe offered her in 1848, to substitute a unified federal system for the constitution imposed upon her in 1815.  The rest of the area falls into six sections:  (1) The kingdom of the Netherlands, containing the two distinct and often antagonistic nations, Belgium and Holland; (2) the German nationality split up into no less than thirty-eight[2] sovereign States, loosely held together in a “confederation”; (3) the Italian nationality, distributed under eight independent governments, including four duchies, two kingdoms, the Papal States, and the provinces under Austrian rule; (4) the Polish nationality, divided up between the three Powers, Prussia, Russia, and Austria; (5) the Austrian Empire, comprising a dozen distinct nationalities; and (6) the Ottoman Empire, in which at least five different Christian peoples groaned beneath the sway of the Mohammedan Turk.  Thus, if we may regard the inhabitants of the southern Netherland provinces, for the moment, as of one nationality, there were roughly ten great nationalities, the Germans, the Italians, the Belgians, the Poles, the Bohemians, the Hungarians, the Southern Slavs, the Rumanians, the Bulgarians, and the Greeks, all left with national aspirations unsatisfied, all hampered by State frontiers which had no correspondence with their natural boundaries.  Can we wonder that there have been wars in the nineteenth century?  Should we not rather wonder that those wars have not been greater and more numerous?  For the Congress of the Powers in 1814 having failed to give the nationalities what they wanted, nothing remained for them but to seize it for themselves.  The only alternative to settlement by conference is “blood and iron,” and it is with “blood and iron” that nearly every nationality which has attained nationhood in the last hundred years has cemented the structure of its State.