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INTRODUCTION 
be dead before the historian can deal with them, — history 
would cease to have interest or value for any but antiqua- 
rians. There is fortunately no need to accept such a con- 
clusion. The history of one’s own time is as proper a theme 
for the modern historian as it was for Thucydides or Po- 
lybius. Whatever future historians may recast of what we 
write or teach, if we bring to the task the scientific temper 
and the patient labor of scholarship, we need not hesitate 
to correct that worst blunder in education, which, by cutting 
off the past from the present, made the one unreal and 
robbed the other of its truer meaning. 
The last thirty years have witnessed two of the greatest 
changes in all the varied history of European civilization. 
On the one hand, the rise of capitalized industry has reached 
such a point that it has practically remade the Old World, 
destroying and rebuilding out-worn, medieval cities, plant- 
ing factories and awakening democracy. On the other hand, 
and largely as a result of the new economic and social forces, 
this European society has expanded throughout the world. 
This expansion has come both by way of the enterprise of 
adventurous traders pushing their wares and gathering in 
the rich natural treasures of savage lands, and through 
formal conquest by imperialistic governments. In the years 
of peace which followed the attainment by Germany and 
Italy of national unity, and more especially in the thirty 
years from 1884 to 1914, the main problems confronting 
statesmen were bound up with either of these two policies: 
the adjustments of the nation to the changing condition of 
life at home, and expansion, for markets or colonies, abroad. 
Naturally, - this story of expansion cannot be properly 
understood when divorced from that of the affairs at home. 
But, if we keep the thread of connection in our minds, and 
from time to time refresh our memories with statistics of 
stock markets and parliamentary debates, we can follow