EUROPE SINCE 1870

BY
EDWARD RAYMOND TURNER, Ph.D.
PROFESSOR OF EUROPEAN HISTORY
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
AUTHOR OF
"EUROPE, 1789-1920," ETC.

GARDEN CITY, N. Y., AND TORONTO

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1921

3] 61 9
 CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Era of 1870 7
II. The French Revolution and After 17
III. New Inventions and the Industrial
Revolution 40
IV. Certain Intellectual and Social
Changes 67
V. The European States in 1870 ... 94
VI. The Military Triumphs of Germany,
1864-1871 122
VII. The Growth of the New German Em-
pire 143
VIII. The Leadership of Germany — The
Triple Alliance 173
IX. The Recovery of France — The Dual
Alliance 210
X. Democratic Britain 240
XI. Russia 269
XII. Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and the
Balkans 304
XIII. and the Lesser States
Italy, Spain, 344
.

XIV. Colonies and Imperial Expansion . 369

.

XV. Triple Alliance and the Ententes 398

.

XVI. The Causes of the Great War . . .421

XVII. The Great War 450
XVIII. The Settlement of 1920 498
XIX. Socialism, Syndicalism, and the
Russian Revolution ..... 529
Appendix 551
Index 557
ix
 CHAPTER T

THE ERA OF 1870 AND EUROPE

Europe the smallest in extent of the four great continents, and yet
is

we may pronounce it the most important of all the divisions of the

globe. Asia, indeed, was the cradle of civilization and knowledge;

but her emi)ires soon became, and have ever since continued,
stationary; while Europe has carried the sciences, arts, and re-
finements, with almost uninterrupted progress, to the compara-
tively elevated state at which they have now arrived. All the
branches of industry are conducted with a skill and to an extent
unattained in any other part of the earth.
Hugh Murray, and others, The Encyclopaedia of Geography
(1855), i. 288, 289.

The beginning of this period of European history, far Two genera-

tions ago
away as it seems now, is not remote tlirough number of
years. Some can still remember 1870, and many fathers and
mothers of the generation now living were of the genera-
tion then in its prime. But passing years have brought
about mighty changes. The men of that time, so be-
wliiskered, as they peer from out of tlie engravings, with
tall hats, loose trousers, long coats; the women, with wide

skirts, crinoline, and shawls; the artisans, the laborers,

the women workers, the peasants, seen in the prints or
cruder pictures of then; all of these people of the era of our
fathers or grandfathers lived amidst changes which have
since made their life and surroundings appear strange and
old-fashioned to us.
Yet, compared with what had been a century previous, The Old
Regime very
before 1789, in the Old Regime, these men and women
different
lived in the midst of conditions much like our own. A from the
hundred years before, in the eighteenth century, almost all period about
1870
the people in Europe had made their living by working the
7
 8 EUROPE SINCE 1870
Lowly con- land. A much smaller number sought their livelihood in
dition of the
manufacturing, commerce, and trade. They worked long
people in the
eighteenth hours with simple tools, and with much labor of muscle
century and hands. Few of them could read and write. Most
of them made up a lower class, without political power
or rights, ruled by a small upper class and sovereigns,
whom they obeyed and supported. The great mass of men
and women were serfs, partly unfree. Between the throng
of laborers, peasants, and serfs on the one hand, and the
great men of the nobility or the Church on the other, was
a middle class, the bourgeoisie, rising in importance, but
in most countries still with small part in controlling affairs.
Generally government was in the hands of sovereigns,
who had power complete and despotic, ruling of them-
selves and through officials whom they appointed or re-
moved at their pleasure. In no great country then did an
important representative assembly exist, save in Great
Britain; and the British parliament, though it was repre-
sentative and endowed with real power, represented only
the upper classes and very often worked in their interests.
Nowhere, except among the followers of such men as
Rousseau, was there any idea that all men, not to speak
of women, should vote and be represented in parliaments,

Religion which should make the laws and grant taxes. There was
much unbelief and religious decadence, but this had been
confined mostly to the upper intellectual class. The
great body of the people everywhere followed the teaching
of their priests without question. Enlightened sceptics
might deride the dogmas of the Church, but the masses,
simple and pious, accepted the Scriptures, with the story
of creation and the fall of man, with the derivative con-
ceptions of heaven, earth, purgatory, and hell, literally,
with no reservation. In most of the countries of Europe
national feeling was dormant or weak.
At this time most people travelled seldom and little.
By land they must go on foot, on horseback, or in cumber-
 THE ERA OF 1870 AND EUROPE 9

made and kept. On Material

some coaches, over poor roads, ill ill
conditions
the rivers they might go down with the current toward in the time
the coast. On the sea they would voyage slowly in small of the Old
sailing ships driven forward by the wind. Not many R6gime

letters could be sent; lliey went slow and might not be

delivj|^d.'|^&B|Espapcrs were few and small and contained
^here was no way of getting news from other
little nfews.

places quickly. Most houses were not well heated, and

there was no way for most people to get enough inex-
pensive fuel. Artificial lighting was scanty and poor;
and after sundown there was such darkness as is not
known to most people now. There was not much ma-
chinery. Manufacturing was mostly carried on in the
laborers' homes. The work was done largely by hand,
with simple tools and devices. The steam engine was
only just beginning to be used. There w^ere not yet any
railroads, no steamboats, no telegraphs, no telephones,
and no electrical apparatus. Only a little had the forces
of nature been reduced to the service of man.
Conditions
By 1870 an immense transformation had come. Divine
about 1870
right of kings and their absolute power had been over-
thrown in western Europe In many countries constitu-
tions had appeared, and governments had come to be
limited and responsible to representatives elected. Most
people still did not accept any idea of complete democracy
or universal suffrage, and would have laughed to scorn the
suggestion that women should have any control over the
governments which ruled them. None the less the con-
dition of women was slowly but constantly improving, and
in one country after another the electorate was being
widened and democracy enhanced and extended. By
this time nationalism had come to be one of the strongest
political forces in the world. In western Europe the power
of nobles and great churchmen had been broken, and an
aristocracy of blood no longer lorded over the mass of the
people. The place of the old nobility now was largely
 10 EUROPE SINCE 1870
Industry held by an industrial aristocracy, the great manufacturers,
and capi-
and traders, much increased in numbers, in
capitalists,
talism
wealth, and in power. They were masters of men em-
ployed in factories and working at the machines of em-
ployers for wages. More and more they dominated the
conduct of affairs. But the workers, so helpless and
oppressed in the early days of the Industrial Revolution,
were slowly gathering power to win better conditions.
Already they were beginning to form industrial trade
unions, while the socialist doctrines of St. Simon and Marx
proclaimed new hopes for the masses of mankind. At
the same time, immense and brilliant scientific investiga-
tion was establishing new ideas which conflicted with the
older teachings of the Church. Men were beginning to
believe that the world was very old, and that things al-
ways had developed by slow change or evolution.
Material During the period just preceding, the advance in dis-
conditions in covery and mechanical invention had been far greater
1870
than in any epoch before. In 1870, it is true, in Europe
as elsewhere, there were no airplanes, no submarines, no
automobiles, no combustion gas engines, and no tram cars
in the cities. The phonograph, the cinema, and wireless
telegraphy had not yet appeared. But some of the great-
est thingswhich we have now men were possessed of then.
The immense liners and huge freight ships which cross
every ocean in our day had not yet appeared, but steam-
ships had revolutionized sea-borne traffic. The passage
over the Atlantic, which had formerly taken a month or
six or seven weeks, now sometimes took
less than a fort-

night. Maritime were

facilities being extended, and
vast changes and improvements made. The Isthmus of
Panama was still the narrow but insuperable obstacle be-
tween the Atlantic and the Pacific that it was in the days
when Balboa toiled slowly from one shore to the other.
But a still greater obstacle to the world's trade had just.

been removed. In 1869 the Suez Canal was opened amidst'

 THE ERA OF 1870 AND EUROPE 11

ma^ificent festivities, memorable for the first perform-

ance of Verdi's Aula. Tlie splendid railroad systems of
Europe, which before the Great War linked all its im-
portant cities together, and formed a network of high-
ways in the more advanced countries of the west, were far
less developed fifty years before; but railways had long
been increasingly important. Already the Prussians were
arranging their railways for war, in "strategic systems."
Partly in consequence of better transportation, partly Machinery
and com-
because of certain great mechanical inventions, an in-
munication
dustrial system had been rising, which made it easy
to produce more necessaries and luxuries than had ever
been possible before in the history of mankind. The
telegraph was everywhere bringing rapid communication
on land, while telegraphs carried in submarine cables were
being laid beneath various seas. In 1866 such a cable had
been stretched across the bottom of the Atlantic. It was
now possible for news to be got quickly from a distance,
and with the development of the power printing-press,
large newspapers containing much news were cir-
fresh
culated widely without delay. Illiteracywas still preva-
lent in eastern and southern Europe, and much of it
remained in all countries except Prussia and a few smaller
states. Yet, it had much diminished since the beginning
of the nineteenth century, and there were constantly more
readers of newspapers, periodicals, and books.
The lands of these people, the mountains, the rivers, The Con-
—
the seas round about all were very much as they had been
tinent of
Europe
for a hundred past generations. In mass and in area
Europe seemed small enough, for it was least among the
continents, less than either of the Americas, only an
extension of Asia, to the east, and small beside the giant
Africa southward. From Asia Europe was marked off

on the east by the low-lying Ural Mountains; southward

by the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea, and by the Cau-
casus Mountains between them. At two points, the
 12 EUROPE SINCE 1870
Bosporus and the Dardanelles, where Constantinople
stood and where ancient Troy once had been, Asia and
Europe were separated by less than the breadth of a river.
Between Europe and Africa lay the Mediterranean, high-
way of commerce and once the very cradle of European
culture. Past the sunlit shores of Greece and Italy
and France, this sea stretched on resplendent and broad,
until narrowing down by the Spanish coast it ended at the
Strait of Gibraltar.
The Euro- Of this Europe the greater part was a vast and exten-
pean plain sive low plain, which embraced all the eastern half of the
continent. From the sunken stretches by the Caspian
and the great wheat lands above the Black Sea, up across
the steppes, the forests, the marshes of Russia, to the
barren tundras of the north, and eastward from the Urals
to the Carpathian Mountains, stretched the mighty ex-
panses of this plain, which was here the home of the
Russian people and mother of the races of the Slavs.
Huge, monotonous, unbroken, it was traversed by broad,
slowly moving rivers, Ural, Volga, Dnieper, and Don,
flowing to the south, and by others less known and less
used flowing northward. Stretching west, to the north
of the Carpathians and mountains, a narrower part
lesser
of this plain extended, across the Prussianand northern
German lands, over Belgium and Holland, across the north-
ern part of France and the western part, down to the
Pyrenees Mountains. And farther north and westward,
beyond the Baltic Sea and the North Sea, beyond lands
long since sunken and drowned, portions of this plain
ended in Sweden and England. Across parts of this
western extension ran the most renowned rivers of Europe,
Vistula, Oder, Elbe, Weser, Rhine, Seine, Loire, Garonne,
and Thames. In this great plain, from the Russian
mountains to the Bay of Biscay and Ireland, lived most
of Europe's inhabitants, and there now were assembled
most of her wealth and grandeur and power.
 THE ERA OF 1870 AND EUROPE 13

Elsewhere mountain and upland held sway over low- Mountain

land and plain. Most of Norway, most of Switzerland, '^^ "P^*°^

all the north half of Scotland, most of Wales, and much

of the Balkan country, were mountainous, and parts of

them backward, sparsely peopled, and poor. Between
Italians, Germans, and Frenchmen the heights of the
Alps rose like a towering rampart, distinctly separating
nations. All the eastern coast of the Adriatic and all the
west side of Norway were a succession of deep jSords and
landlocked bays between lofty and precipitous mountains.
In 1870 the inhabitants of Albania were in the midst of
the savage, tribal conditions in which Lord Byron had
known them sixty years earlier, like the Scottish High-
landers two centuries before. Spain, with plateau lands
traversed by parallel ranges, was definitely marked off
from France by the Pyrenees Mountains. In central
Europe the Carpathians lay like a bulwark reared against
Russia.
The principal arteries of communication and commerce Rivers and
continued to be the rivers and the seas. The more im- seas

portant rivers of north Russia and those of eastern Ger-

many drained to the Baltic, whence the commerce of
these regions went outward in between the Scandinavian
countries to the North Sea and the oceans of the world.
The Germany, the Low Countries, and north
rivers of west
France, flowed to the North Sea and the English Channel,
whence their commerce was carried to the Atlantic. Be-
yond the Continent lay England, just where she com-
manded all of this commerce. Her favorable position had
brought her great wealth and power. To London, on
the estuary of the Thames, came the shipping of the world,
while Liverpool, on the western side of England, throve on
the growing American trade. Eastern Russia drained
down to the land-locked Caspian through the mighty
length of the Volga. All central and southern Russia
looked toward the Black Sea, while Austria, Hungary, and
 14 EUROPE SINCE 1870
the Balkan countries were nourished by the Danube
which sought this sea also. The commerce of the Black
Sea went ina steady stream past Constantinople and
where it was mostly borne
Gallipoli to the Mediterranean,
westward past southern Europe out by Gibraltar to the
Atlantic Ocean. On the Mediterranean, brought thither
by road or river,went the commerce of Greece, of Italy,
of southern France, and of most of Spain.
The land The great land routes sought the valleys and the plains,
routes or, if necessary, climbed uplands and the mountain
passes. Through the Pyrenees went the overland routes
between France and Spain. Through the several Alpine
passes armies and merchants had gone from the time of
Hannibal to the time of Napoleon, and under the Alps long
tunnels for railways were soon to be built. Between the
French and the German peoples, between Paris and
Berlin, the old roads, the modern trunk line, the principal
highway, traversed the plain across Belgium and Holland,
and across these small countries, especially Belgium, from
one to the other of the mightier neighbors, merchants and
their wares had gone for ages, and armies had often met
there in mortal combat.
Memorials, This Europe was a land very rich in its past, enshrined
traditions,
in old deeds and traditions. Some ancient crosses and
associations
round towers still existed in Ireland. Up and down Eng-
land, from Canterbury to Durham, were the cathedrals,
with their majesty, beauty, and repose. In Portugal
were the vast, deserted palaces built in former times.
In Spain the Escurial watched over its gray, wide
plain, while the sublime quietude of the cathedral at
Toledo witnessed the devotion of days elsewhere gone.
All through the southern parts of France were relics of
Greeks, of Romans, of medieval culture, from the aque-
duct near Nimes and the amphitheatre at Aries to the
fortress towers and the keep of Carcassonne. Northward
v.ere the cathedrals, at Bourges, at Chartres, at Amiens,
 THE ERA OF 1870 AND EUROPE 15

at Rheims, and Noire-Dcime de Paris; and farther on tlic Cities of

abbeys and churches of the Normans. In Belgium tlie ^^^^^^^

Cloth Hall at Ypres, the towers and old bridges of Bruges.
, At Cologne the cathedral spires threw their shadows down
by the Rhine. All across western Germany, along the
Baltic, down through Austria and its provinces, were
memorials of an older German culture, at Augsburg, at
Niirnberg, at Innsbruck, at Salzburg, at Rotlienburg, and
Aachen. In Italy were the palaces and churclies of Milan
and Florence, the canals and the marbles of Venice, the
tombs of Ravenna, the tower of Pisa, the Coliseum at
Rome and St. Peter's, and near Naples the older ruins of
Pompeii were even then being uncovered. By the Danube
at Vienna stood the houses of the proudest aristocracy in
Europe. At Constantinople bulked, as if for ever, the
dome of Sania ISophia; before it rose in slender height the
newer minarets of the Turk. Across the stretches of the
Russian plain were Moscow and Novgorod, in their as-
pect half oriental; and farther still, at Samara on the
Volga, the market place, with riot of colors and babel
of voices, its throngs come from Europe and Asia.
The mountains of southern Spain had looked down when The past
^^^ ^^®
the Moors gjiined their victories and afterward made
Dr6S6Ilt
their last stand. The Pillars of Hercules had watched
the Phoenician galleys go by. The fogs and the rain blew
in Ireland as in the time of Saint Patrick. The Channel
and the Rhine had long before been observed and described
by Caesar. Older by far than the Catacombs of Rome
or the ruined temple at Paestum, Vesuvius poured forth
its smoke, while Stromboli glared in the night as when
Carthaginians came sailing north. The Alpine passes
had seen the ages go by, with the barbarians, the con-
querors, the merchants, the pilgrims, who had toiled to
their heights, then gone downward. INIore ancient than

Homer or Sappho was the beauty of the isles of tlie Greeks.

A few years before the Carpathians had been pierced
 16 EUROPE SINCE 1870
Europe an by Russian armies, as long since they had been traversed
ancient
^ Hungarians and Huns. The endless reaches of Russia
home of mi
stretched on m remoteness and sadness.
• •
i i -r»i
peoples The Rhme
flowed dowTi, past medieval castles and new industrial
cities, by ancient vineyards, by the memories of Roman

bridges. The stars of the night, which had glittered for

Galileo and Dante, watched now the nineteenth century
slowly draw toward its close. Beside these things the state-
craft of rulers, wars, treaties, arrangements, the toil and the
lives of people, man's doings and man's aspirations, here
as elsewhere seemed fleeting, small, unimportant.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
For a general, brief summary of European life and conditions:
E. R. Turner, Europe, 1789-1920 (1920).
The accounts of travellers often contain vivid description
and a great deal of interesting information: Edmondo De
Amicis, UOlanda (1874, trans. 1880), Ricordi di Londra (1874);
W. C. Bryant, Letters of a Traveller (1850); Charles Dickens,
Pictures from Italy (1844); R. W. Emerson, English Traits
(1856); Theophile Gautier, Voyage en Espagne (1843, trans.
1853), Italia (1852), Voyage en Russie (1866); A. J. C. Hare,
Walks in Rome (1871); Nathaniel Hawthorne, Our Old Home
(1863), English Note Books (1870), French and Italian Note
Books (1871); John Hay, Castilian Days (1871); Victor Hugo,
Le Rhin (1842); H. W. Longfellow, Outre-Mer (1835); H. B.
Stowe, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, 2 vols. (1854) Hippo-
;

lyte Taine, Voyage aux Pyrenees (1855), Voyage en Italic (1866,

trans. 1869), Notes sur V Angleterre (1872); Bayard Taylor,
Views Afoot (1846), Travels in Greece andRussia (1859), Northern
Travel (1860); W. M. Thackeray, The Paris Sketch Book (1868),
The Irish Sketch Book (1869); C. D. Warner, In the Levant
(1875); Edward Whymper, Scrambles among the Alps (1871);
N. P. Willis, Pencillings by the Way (1835).