Revolution, some explanation of the Great European war of 1914
may be reached. Every event in history has its roots somewhere in
earlier history, and we need but dig deep enough to find them.

Such is the purpose of the present work. It proposes to lay down
in a series of apposite chapters the story of the past century,
beginning, in fact, rather more than a century ago with the
meteoric career of Napoleon and seeking to show to what it led,
and what effects it had upon the political evolution of mankind.
The French Revolution stood midway between two spheres of
history, the sphere of medieval barbarism and that of modern
enlightenment. It exploded like a bomb in the midst of the
self-satisfied aristocracy of the earlier social system and rent
it into the fragments which no hand could put together again. In
this sense the career of Napoleon seems providential. The era of
popular government had replaced that of autocratic and
aristocratic government in France, and the armies of Napoleon
spread these radical ideas throughout Europe until the oppressed
people of every nation began to look upward with hope and see in
the distance before them a haven of justice in the coming realm
of human rights.

It required considerable time for these new conceptions to become
thoroughly disseminated. A down-trodden people enchained by the
theory of the "divine right of kings" to autocratic rule, had to
break the fetters one by one and gradually emerge from a state of
practical serfdom to one of enlightened emancipation. There were
many setbacks, and progress was distressingly slow but
nevertheless sure.