Sweden was once one of the great powers of Europe.  However, about 1700 A.D., she had a king named Charles XII, who tried to conquer Russia and Poland.  He was finally defeated at a little town in the southern part of Russia nearly a thousand miles away from home, and his great army was wiped out.  After his time, Sweden sank to the level of a second class nation.  The bodies of her best men had been strewn on battlefields reaching from the Gulf of Bothnia to the Black Sea.

[Illustration:  Charles XII of Sweden]

For eighty years after the time of Napoleon, the French nation showed a lower birth rate and produced smaller and weaker men than it had one hundred years previously.  The reason for this is easily found.  During the twenty-three years of terrible fighting which followed the execution of the king, France left her finest young men dead all over the face of Europe.  They died by the thousands in Spain, in Italy, in Austria, in Germany, and above all, amidst the snows and ice of Russia.  Only within the last twenty years have the French, through their new interest in out-of-door sports and athletics, begun once more to build up a hardy, vigorous race of young men.  And now came this terrible war to set France back where she was one hundred years ago.

Picture Europe at the close of this great war; the flower of her young manhood gone; the survivors laden with debts which will keep them in poverty for years to come; trade and agriculture at a standstill; but worst of all, the feeling of friendship between nations, of world brotherhood, postponed one hundred years.  Hatred of nation for nation is stronger than ever.

Questions for Review

 1.  How does a nation at war increase its debts?
 2.  Why do diseases thrive in war time?
 3.  What became of the Goths and Franks?
 4.  Why was the reign of Charles XII disastrous to Sweden?
 5.  What was the effect of Napoleon’s many wars upon the strength of
    the French nation?
 6.  Is war growing more humane?

CHAPTER XXVI

  What Germany Must Learn

The German plot.—­What the Czar’s prohibition order did.—­Where Germany miscalculated.—­Where England and America failed to understand.—­An appeal to force must be answered by force.—­Effect of the Russian revolution.—­“It never must happen again.”—­The league to enforce peace.—­The final lesson.

Before 1914 friends of peace in all countries, but especially in English speaking lands, had hoped that there would never again be a real war between civilized nations.