Preface

       Table of Contents

      To all thoughtful persons the European War has brought home with overwhelming power the importance of a knowledge of modern European history. For without such knowledge no one can understand, or begin to understand, the significance of the forces that have made it, the vastness of the issues involved, the nature of what is indisputably one of the gravest crises, if not the very gravest, in the history of mankind. The destinies of every nation in this world and the conditions of life of every individual will inevitably be changed, and may be profoundly changed, by the outcome of this gigantic and portentous conflict. No citizen of a free country who takes his citizenship seriously, who considers himself responsible, to the full extent of his personal influence, for the character and conduct of his government, can, without the crudest self-stultification, admit that he knows nothing and cares nothing about the history of Europe.

      If he cares for his own national inheritance and tradition, for its characteristic and fundamental policies and principles, then he will care most emphatically about what happens in Europe. Nothing that happens there is really foreign to us, for the fortunes of Europe and America are inextricably intertwined.

      This, in my opinion the most outstanding fact in the modern world, was exemplified in the eighteenth century in the person of Lafayette, an American patriot and a French