FROM THE AUTHOR'S DEDICATION (1854)[1]
TO HIS MAJESTY GEORGE V, KING OF HANOVER
The great events — the bloody wars, the revolutions, and the breaking up of laws — which have been rife for so many years in the States of Europe, are apt to turn men's minds to the study of political problems. While the vulgar consider merely im- mediate results, and heap all their praise and blame on the little electric spark that marks the contact with their own interests, the more serious thinker will seek to discover the hidden causes of these terrible upheavals. He will descend, lamp in hand, by the obscure paths of philosophy and history ; and in the analysis of the human heart or the careful search among the annals of the past he will try to gain the master-key to the enigma which has so long baffled the imagination of man.
Like every one else, I have felt all the prickings of curiosity to which our restless modern world gives rise. But when I tried to study, as completely as I could, the forces underlying this world, I found the horizon of my inquiry growing wider and wider. I had to push further and further into the past, and, forced by analogy almost in spite of myself, to lift my eyes further and further into the future. It seemed that I should aspire to know not merely the immediate causes of the plagues that are supposed to chasten us, but also to trace the more remote reasons for those social evils which the most meagre knowledge of history will show to have prevailed, in exactly the same form, among all the nations that ever lived, as well as those
- ↑ This dedication and the following preface apply to the whole work, of which the present volume contains the first book. The remaining books are occupied by a detailed examination of the civilizations mentioned at the end of this volume, and it is of these as well as the present book that the author is thinking, in his preface, when speaking of his imitators. A few passages in the dedication that relate exclusively to these books have been omitted. — Tr.
