Events Culminating in The Great Conflict
Events Culminating in The Great Conflict
Book Excerpt
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 serf
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