here is no denying that more blood has been shed by
civilized nations during the last one hundred and twenty years than in
any equal period of the world's history. Anyone may realize the fact by
simply recalling the great wars which have devastated the world since
the American Revolution.

But the carnage was not uninterrupted. The record of death is divided in
the midst by the thirty years of comparative peace which followed the
battle of Waterloo and preceded the general revolution of 1848. Napoleon
had harried the world, from Moscow to Cairo, from Vienna to Madrid,
pouring blood upon blood, draining the world's veins dry, exhausting
the destroying power of mankind in perpetual destruction. When he was
gone, Europe was utterly worn out by his terrible energy, and collapsed
suddenly in a state of universal nervous prostration. Then came the long
peace, from 1815 to 1848.

During that time the European nations, excepting England, were governed
by more or less weak and timid sovereigns, and it was under their feeble
rule that the great republican idea took root and grew, like a cutting
from the stricken tree of the French Revolution, planted in the heart of
Europe, nurtured in secret, and tended by devoted hands to a new
maturity, but destined to ruin in the end, as surely as the parent
stock.

Those thirty and odd years were a sort of dull season in Europe--an
extraordinarily uneventful period, during which the republican idea was
growing, and during which the monarchic idea was decaying. Halfway
through that time--about 1830--Joseph Mazzini founded the Society of
Young Italy, in connection with the other secret societies of Europe,
and acquired that enormous influence which even now is associated with
his name. Mazzini and Garibaldi meant to make a republic of Italy. The
House of Savoy did not at that time dream of a united Italian Kingdom.
The most they dared hope was the acquisition of territory on the north
by the expulsion of the Austrians. England and circumstances helped the
Savoy family in their sudden and astonishing rise of fortune; for at
that time Austria was the great military nation of Europe, while France
was the naval power second to England, and through the Bourbons, Italy
was largely under the influence of Austria. England saw that the
creation of an independent friendly power in the Mediterranean would
both tend to diminish Austria's strength by land, and would check France
in her continued efforts