involving such a mass of political, economic, moral, psychological, and other elements, that any formula as to its essentials and its significance must necessarily be of a very general character. If, therefore, we desire to form a correct estimate of what the significance of the war was, we must not merely investigate the political and other causes which brought it about, but also how it was conducted, which moral and material factors, which main ideas, and which main interests were victorious during its progress; and, finally, what positive result it produced, why and how it ended, and also what its aspect is from the point of view of the post-war crisis. In this connection we must first and foremost emphasize the fact that the war was not merely a conflict of liberated nationalist movements. Its basis was far wider, although this element was also contained in it.
The war can best be characterized by means of its results. It destroyed four great absolutist empires; three of them it transformed into republics, after having swept away their dynasties, while from the fourth one, the Habsburg Empire, it created six new national States. It destroyed the dynasty, the Government comprising the aristocratic and military elements, and, in fact, all the absolutist remnants of the old regime. It solved the problem of conferring unity and independence upon Poland, Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia, as well as Rumania, Greece, Albania, the Baltic States, and Finland. It completed the national unification of Italy, settled the Alsace-Lorraine and the Schleswig-Holstein problems, and promoted several questions relating to the British Empire, influencing its constitution in the spirit of the self-determination of States and nations. Moreover, for the first time, it imposed a system of Colonial mandates, which again denotes an advance on the lines of self-determination.
The war also revived or evoked the question of independence or self-administration in the case of several Asiatic nations, the question of the freedom of the seas, of universal disarmament, a universal court of justice, and the League of Nations. Within all States where hitherto the old regime had fully or only partially held sway, the war imparted a strong democratic character to the political institutions, and brought about a great expansion in the socialistic movement. Through the Russian revolution it gave prominence to questions concerning the social structure of present-day States, and enforced the solution
