With the year 1871 came the settlement of those great
political questions that had been troubling central
and western Europe since 1815, and the Powers entered upon a
period of diplomatic inactivity that contrasted strangely with
the bustle and concern of the preceding twenty years. Italy
was a united state with Rome as her capital; the duchies of
Schleswig and Holstein were a part of Prussia; and Germany was
an Empire under the house of Hohenzollern. France having
rid herself of the last Bonaparte was taking up the problems of
1848 with the determination to solve them in the interests of
the republic. Austria had withdrawn from Germany, had lifted
her hand from Italy, and was at last turning her eyes away
from Frankfort, Venetia, and the west to Pesth and the east.
The political boundaries of the European states were fixed and
except for the question of Alsace and Lorraine no further
changes, save in Turkey, were likely to be made in the terri-
torial arrangements of the states that composed the European
system. In constitutional matters the end of a long struggle
had been reached and parliamentary government in the west
and constitutional government in the centre of Europe had be-
come the permanent form of political life. Few traces of the
old absolutism anywhere remained, for national unity and
political liberty, inseparable parts of the higher intellectual and
industrial life upon which Europe had already entered, marked

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