The Congress of Vienna 41
ment would be not a virtue but a calamity, for at the best
even truth is necessarily relative.
It is this never ending and seemingly hopeless quest which
makes history neither the past life of man itself, for that is
too vast and beyond discovery, nor the documents and books
which are stored up in musty libraries, important and for-
gotten, but a living study of a past which shall illumine and
give hope and significance to some present, either lingering
in our memories of yesterday or yet only dimly realized and
expected. In his forward look the historian is like the states-
man, and History stands like Statesmanship with the ruddy
glow of the dawn of future ages shining on her upturned
face.
In such a spirit, when the next great peace congress shall
meet, to-morrow or day after to-morrow, whether it shall
go down into history as the Congress of Amsterdam, or
Madrid, or Antwerp is comparatively insignificant. What
will really matter is whether it has within it enough of genius
and good will to make its work a landmark in the progress
of the human spirit. How will it differ in the men who com-
pose it, in the methods which they pursue, in the principles
which guide them, and in the ends which they achieve from
those five or six great congresses of other ages?
Before the time of the Thirty Years’ War there were no
international congresses for the very good reason that na-
tions and states in the modern sense of these terms were just
crystallizing out of the welter of the Middle Ages. We are
so familiar with the idea of a state living its more or less
sovereign life among its fellows that it is easy to forget what
a really new thing is a world composed of separate states
living together in a family, with their rivalries and quarrels,
and with the necessity of building up a new code of morals,
or of law, corresponding to the older, ever changing means