for what he was, an individual man getting the better of his fellow men. He had small doubt in his struggle with the republicans, where the moral superiority lay. With Napoleon, we note the beginning of a clearer-headed age. The self-deceptions of wealth, power, and prominence wear thin. His new imperialism reflected upon the old.
For a time the Concert of Europe struggled valiantly to carry on upon the old lines, but the French Revolution had shrivelled the heart of monarchy. In 1830, and again in 1848, the evaporation of the simple old royalist faith became very evident. Alexander I and his narrow-minded successor, Nicholas I, could still sustain the delusion of divine right in Russia—that did not perish until 1917—the idea hung on in Prussia in spite of much muttered criticism,[1] but for the rest of Europe the days of the unchallenged claim of kingship had gone. "What good are you?" said the world to monarchs; "and what do you do for us?"
So challenged, many of the monarchs became apologetic and fussily useful. One or two, as we shall have to tell, became "Napoleonic." But so far no European monarch has betrayed any disposition to waive the remnant of his ancient trappings, to cease his passive and traditional opposition to political readjustment, and to move of his own accord towards that more broadly conceived government of human affairs as one world-wide community of will, which the future welfare of mankind demands.
§ 7[2]
For nearly forty years the idea of the Holy Alliance, the Concert of Europe which arose out of it, and the series of congresses and conferences that succeeded the concert, kept an insecure peace in war-exhausted Europe. Two main things prevented that period from being a complete social and international peace, and prepared the way for the cycle of wars between 1854 and 1871. The first of these was the tendency of the royal courts concerned,
- ↑ See J. W. Headlam's Life of Bismarck.
- ↑ W. A. Phillips' Confederation of Europe is the leading textbook here. H. E. Egerton's British Foreign Policy in the Nineteenth Century and L. S. Woolf's International Government are very illuminating. See also Thatcher and Schwill's convenient General History of Europe and Philip Guedalla's Partition of Europe; 1715-1815.
