development of modern Europe. It was the tramp of the invader which
did more than anything else to awake sleeping nationalism all over the
Continent; it was before the roar of Napoleon's cannon that the artificial
boundaries which had divided peoples crumbled to dust. Napoleon cleared the
ground, and even did something toward laying the foundations of the great
modern Nation-States, Germany and Italy. What Napoleon did for Europe at
the beginning of the nineteenth century, Germany, the Napoleon-State among
nations to-day, is doing for Europe at the beginning of the twentieth
century.


§3. _The Congress of Vienna and the International Idea_.--The overthrow of
Napoleon was due in a large measure to the spirit of nationalism which his
conquests had evoked against him among the various peoples of Europe; the
rewards of that overthrow, however, were reaped not by the peoples, but by
the dynasties and State-systems of the old _régime_. The Congress of the
Powers which met at Vienna in 1814 to resettle the map of Europe, after
the upheavals and wars of the previous twenty-five years, was a terrible
disappointment; and we, who are now hopefully looking forward to a similar
Congress at the end of the present war, cannot do better than study the
great failure of 1814, and take warning from it. The phrases which heralded
the approaching Congress were curiously and disquietingly similar to those
on the lips of our public men and journalists to-day when they speak of
the "settlement" before us. "The Parliament of Man, the Federation of the
World," which had become a remote dream when Tennyson first coined the
expression in 1842, seemed in 1814 on the eve of accomplishment. The work
of the Congress was to be no less than "the reconstruction of the moral
order," "the regeneration of the political system of Europe," the
establishment of "an enduring peace founded on a just redistribution
of political forces," the institution of an effective and a permanent