Nineteenth Century European Civilization 1815 1914 Reprinted PDF Download

Excerpt from Introduction to the History of the Peace, From 1800-1815 Before the Nineteenth century opened, the inhabitants of Europe had entered upon a new period in the history of mankind; a period which must be a conspicuous one to students of History through all future ages. - During the greater part of the eighteenth century, the potentates of Europe, and the higher order of their subjects with whom they associated, had been satisfied that the height of political civilization had been reached, by such an adjustment of the Balance of Power as had never before been attained. The system appeared to be brought very near perfection. The solar system hardly seemed safer. The smaller states of Europe lived and moved among the larger as freely and securely as the lesser planets in their orbits, protected from absorption by the larger, by the balancing principle which kept all in their places. It is true, there was a failure here and there, such as one does not see in the systems of the sky. There was the partition of Poland, for one. The plea for the partition was, that Poland could not be sustained as a separate power, on account of her miserable distractions; and that she must have been absorbed by some one State, destroying the universal balance, if she had not been portioned out among several. There were complaints in certain quarters too about the reductions of Austrian power, and the aggrandizement of Prussia: but, upon the whole, it was evident to the world at large that Europe presented the most advanced political condition ever witnessed, in the spectacle of its Balance of Power. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.