The Congress of Vienna 43
The Congress of Westphalia, which closed in 1648, was
the first great international congress of any kind. For this
reason alone it is certainly one of the supremely significant
events in the history of the world. Although some of its
problems now seem remote, yet it is to be remembered as
the mark of a new era, and, if for nothing else, as the point
at which the influence of that great jurist, Hugo Grotius,
began to teach men new ideas of international right and
wrong at the very dawn of the society of nations. In the
following century another congress sat at Utrecht, settling
affairs of great moment to the powers involved, and fur-
nishing another early precedent for the international con-
gresses which were to be so important a feature of European
history in the age of Metternich. These earlier congresses
were genuinely international, but, in their composition and
their etiquette, they sometimes seemed assemblies of princes
and kings rather than gatherings of sovereign and indepen-
dent nations. Their problems, too, have something of the
mediæval flavor. It is only when we get to the Congress of
Vienna that we meet our distinctively modern problems and
find as if in solution those ideas which are the centre of the
immense conflict of to-day.
The world had gone a long distance forward in the hun-
dred years which lay between Utrecht and Vienna. At
Utrecht the slave trade was still regarded merely as a valu-
able commercial privilege which bore no relation at all to
morals or to law. England sought and gained for herself
the monopoly of the trade between Africa and the Spanish
empire in America. At Vienna, the English representatives,
under the influence of Wilberforce, took the lead in securing
the passage of a resolution in which all the states promised
to do their best to secure the abolition of the iniquitous busi-
ness. The promise was none too definite, since no special