Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from A Short History of Our Own Times: From the Accession of Queen Victoria to the Accession of King Edward VII
These realms. 11 have done my best to trace in this volume the development of the arts of peace as well as of the outbreaks, the struggles, and the desolations of war. We have had during these more recent days some definite and I trust memorable attempts to bring about a combination among the great Powers of the world for the establishment of an international tribunal having for its work the adoption of a common code which should hold the war spirit in check and subject it to healthful control from the principles of equity and the spirit Of peace. Thus far nothing much has come in practical effect from the founding of such a tribunal, but it is, to say the least Of it, a memor able era in history when the tribunal has been actually founded by the co-operation of all the great Powers and of the smaller Powers as well, and the principles Of equity and Of peace are thus recognised as entitled to have some legalised and commonly accepted control over the destinies of nations. 'the parliament of man, the federation of the world, ' has not yet come into genuine working order, but it must not be re garded as a mere philosophical forecast or a poetic fantasy. Nothing certainly can be more remarkable in the develop ments of later years than the growth which we can see in the in?uence of popular opinion all through the civilised world. Education has been spreading everywhere, and no where more, in proportion at least, than in our own country, where the work of genuine national education had been strangely neglected even until far down in our own times. N OW it may be taken as almost a scientific fact that the spread of national education in all countries must lead to the develop ment of the arts of peace and the suppression of impulses towards the work of war. I have not attempted in this short history, or even in the volumes from which it is condensed, to enter into any elaborate disquisitions as to the manner in which autocratic government and the neglect of national education must tend towards the promotion Of war for the sake Of conquest, but I think it would be hardly possible to study the history Of Queen Victoria's reign without finding there some striking illustrations of that general lesson. That reign will happily be memorable, above all things else, for its contributions towards the arts of peace. It had a literature of its own quite as distinct and Characteristic as that of Queen Elizabeth or Queen Anne. Its poets were of their own time, and were not mere echoes of the past. It had a school of art all its own, and even the curious pre-raphaelite movement had much of novelty and originality in it, and was not in any sense a mere fantastic effort at a revival of a bygone.
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