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n of that day. She

was at the mercy of her spiritual advisers and these worthy

gentlemen felt no love for the Protestant King of Prussia. ``Be

bold,'' was the advice of the Empress to her husband, but she

omitted to add the second half of that famous Persian proverb

which admonishes the hero to ``be bold but not too bold.''

Napoleon, convinced of the strength of his army, addressed

himself to the king of Prussia and insisted that the king give

him assurances that ``he would never permit another candidature

of a Hohenzollern prince to the Spanish crown.'' As

the Hohenzollerns had just declined the honour, the demand

was superfluous, and Bismarck so informed the French government.

But Napoleon was not satisfied.

It was the year 1870 and King William was taking the

waters at Ems. There one day he was approached by the

French minister who tried to re-open the discussion. The king

answered very pleasantly that it was a fine day and that the

Spanish question was now closed and that nothing more

remained to be said upon the subject. As a matter of

routine, a report of this interview was telegraphed to

Bismarck, who handled all foreign affairs. Bismarck edited

the dispatch for the benefit of the Prussian and French

press. Many people have called him names for doing

this. Bismarck however could plead the excuse that the doctoring

of official news, since time immemorial, had been one

of the privileges of all civilised governments. When the ``edited''

telegram was printed, the good people in Berlin felt that

their old and venerable king with his nice white whiskers had

been insulted by an arrogant little Frenchman and the equally

good people of Paris flew into a rage because their perfectly

courteous minister had been shown the door by a Royal Prussian

flunkey.

And so they both went to war and in less than two months,

Napoleon and the greater part of his army were prisoners of

the Germans. The Second Empire had come to an end and the

Third Republic was making ready to defend Paris against the

German invaders. Paris held out for five long months. Ten

days before the surrender of the city, in the nearby palace of

Versailles, built by that same King Louis XIV who had been

such a dangerous enemy to the Germans, the King of Prussia

was publicly proclaimed German Emperor and a loud booming

of guns told the hungry Parisians that a new German Empire

had taken the place of the old harmless Confederation of Teutonic

states and stateless.

In this rough way, the German question was finally settled.

By the end of the year 1871, fifty-six years after the memorable

gathering at Vienna, the work of the Congress had been entirely

undone. Metternich and Alexander and Talleyrand had tried

to give the people of Europe a lasting peace. The methods

they had employed had caused endless wars and revolutions and

the feeling of a common brotherhood of the eighteenth century

was followed by an era of exaggerated nationalism which has

not yet come to an end.

THE AGE OF THE ENGINE

BUT WHILE THE PEOPLE OF EUROPE WERE

FIGHTING FOR THEIR NATIONAL

INDEPENDENCE, THE WORLD IN WHICH THEY

LIVED HAD BEEN ENTIRELY CHANGED

BY A SERIES OF INVENTIONS, WHICH HAD

MADE THE CLUMSY OLD STEAM ENGINE

OF THE 18TH CENTURY THE MOST FAITHFUL

AND EFFICIENT SLAVE OF MAN

THE greatest benefactor of the human race died more than

half a million years ago. He was a hairy creature with a low

brow and sunken eyes, a heavy jaw and strong tiger-like teeth.

He would not have looked well in a gathering of modern scientists,

but they would have honoured him as their master. For

he had used a stone to break a nut and a stick to lift up a heavy

boulder. He was the inventor of the hammer and the lever, our

first tools, and he did more than any human being who came

after him to give man his enormous advantage over the other

animals with whom he shares this planet.