The Dawning of the Twentieth Century in Europe [pp. 761-772]

THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. LVIII. MARCH, I894. NO. 348.
THE DAWNING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
IN EUROPE.
BY QUASIVATES.
YEAR I9o00 begins in Europe with a frightful
retrospect and a hopeful future. It witnesses
the close of the greatest war of modern his fj 1tory, and the beginning of a new era of peace
which, owing to the foundations on which it
rests, promises to be durable. In its extent
and in its ravages the war was without parallel. Almost every
state in Europe, great and small, was involved. Torrents of
blood have been shed; the torch and the cannon have levelled
many of the fairest places of the continent. An armistice was
at last agreed upon; a new congress of Vienna was held, and
the terms of a general peace were at length arranged.
This peace might not differ from any of its predecessors,
only in the probability of its being of greater length, were the
dynastic conditions which marked its beginning at all similar
to those which obtained at the outbreak of hostilities. Those
"Spanish marriages" have been at the bottom of nearly every
great international complication in Europe for the past three
centuries. Why the populations of the most civilized quarter
of the globe should have so long endured the imposition of a
frightful periodical blood-tax and a no less monstrous money.
drain, that the personal ambition of a half-a-dozen blue-blooded
families might be gratified, must for ever remain a thing inexplicable to the historian. The fact that in a democratic age
three or four ambitious individuals styled emperors were en Copyright. VERY Rrv. A. F. HNWXT. I894.
VOL. LVIII.-51