Tag Archives: The Written Record

The new “navalism,” which already had assertive advocates in Britain and Germany, derived many of its doctrines from the writings of an American officer, Captain Alfred T. Mahan (1840-1914). Mahan’s book The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890), and his later works assigned navies a place of preeminent importance in determining power status and found an influential audience at home and abroad, especially in Germany, Britain, and Japan.

Bureaucracy is one of those words that has changed in connotation while also describing a major development that is part of “modernization.” As nation-states became ever more centralized and powerful, they tended to take on more and more responsibilities with respect to their citizens. Agencies of government, that is bureaus, were created to administer the various aspects of government: foreign affairs, excise and taxation, the police, social welfare, national education, and so forth.

In June 1867, the Dinner of the Three Emperors brought together Alexander II, czar of Russia, the czarevich (the future Alexander III), and the future emperor William I (then king of Prussia) at the Cafe Anglais in Paris to dine most royally, as the menu indicates. Guests had a choice of soups and could substitute fritters of beef brain steeped in Seville orange juice for one of the main courses. Otherwise all foods and wines were served to everyone.

Soups

Imperatrice
Fontanges

Intermediate Course

Souffle a la Reine
Fillet of sole Venetian
Collops of turbot au gratin

The Song of the Shirt,” by the minor English poet Thomas Hood (1799-1845), was prompted by a London news report about the arrest of a seamstress for pawning articles belonging to her employer. Paid by the piece, she could earn at the maximum seven shillings a week, on which she was expected to support herself and two young children.

Work—work—work
Till the brain begins to swim; Work—work—work
Till the eyes are heavy and dim! Seam, and gusset, and band, Band, and gusset, and seam,
Till over the buttons I fall asleep And sew them on in a dream!
0! Men, with Sisters dear!

Pope Leo XIII was concerned with issues of liberty and political power. He was sympathetic to the plight of the workers and felt that the Church should recognize their concerns, though he did not believe in the inevitable clash of labor and capital.

Thus in Rerum novarum he wrote that it was a “great mistake” to believe that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the wealthy and the workingmen are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict…. Each needs the other: Capital cannot do without Labor, nor Labor without Capital… .

Frequently, entire families had to work as a matter of sheer economic necessity. A factory worker testified before a British parliamentary committee in 1831-1832:

At what time in the morning, in the brisk time, did those girls go to the mills? In the brisk time, for about six weeks, they have gone at 3 o’clock in the morning, and ended at 10, or nearly half-past, at night.

What intervals were allowed for rest or refreshment during those nineteen hours of labour? Breakfast a quarter of an hour, and dinner half an hour, and drinking of ale a quarter of an hour.

The movement of people from one land to another, from one continent to another, has marked history since antiquity, and today is one of the most notable realities of a world in a steady state of enormous change. Entire societies have moved from one place to another; millions of individuals change the place where they live, the environment in which they work and learn, even the language they speak, every year.

In foreign relations, the United States sought to isolate itself as best it could from the contamination of European wars. Clearly those wars would spread to the New World if the European powers acquired new colonies in the Western Hemisphere. President James Monroe addressed this point in 1823 in what came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine.

In 1817 the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley captured the romantic sense of despair in his poem “Ozymandias,” which stated anew the biblical warning that the overweening aspirations of arrogant humanity would be as dust to dust.

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

In the Italian campaign Major General Bonaparte, still only in his twenties, cleared the Austrians out of their strongholds in one year and made them sue for peace. He showed a remarkable ability to strike quickly and to surprise his opponents before they could consolidate their defenses. He also showed a gift for propaganda and public relations, as this proclamation from the early phases of the campaign illustrates:

Soldiers! In two weeks you have won six victories; you have made fifteen-thousand prisoners; you have killed or wounded more than ten-thousand men.