24 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS. 



EUROPE DURINCx THE LAST THIRTY YEARS. 



Read before the Haniilton Association, Jan. 2dth, i8gj. 

 BY REV. J. H. LONG, M. A., LL. B. 



The world of to-day is very different from that of thirty years 

 ago. The changes have been so gradual that they have, in 

 many cases, escaped notice. But, could we suddenly be set down 

 in the world as it was thirty or thirty-five years ago, we should scarce- 

 ly be able to recognize our own identity. The great civil war on 

 this continent was then at its height : the issue still lay in the future. 

 Iron-clads, breech-loading rifles, and Maxim guns, were but in 

 embryo ; dynamite was virtually unknown ; the Atlantic cable was 

 an experiment ; the telephone, the electric light, the electric railway, 

 the bicycle, had never been thought of for practical purposes ; while 

 baccili and microbes were in indisputed possession of the physiological 

 field. The Dark Continent was, then, not a name, but a reality ; 

 the Suez Canal was unbuilt ; no Transcontinental Railway joined the 

 Atlantic to the Pacific ; slavery existed in civilized lands ; Central 

 Asia was unexplored ; the Pope sat upon his temporal throne ; there 

 was no German empire, and France was ruled by Napoleon the 

 Third. Truly, we should not recognize our surroundings could the 

 hand be put back on the dial-plate of Time ! 



But it is not of all these things — it is not of scientific progress 

 that I wish to speak : it is of the political changes that these years 

 have brought about in Europe — changes fraught with the most mo- 

 mentous consequences to Europe and the whole world. In 

 considering this matter it will be sufficient to confine our thoughts 

 to three movements : the rise of the German Empire, the unification 

 of Italy, and the decadence of the Turkish Power. There have been, 

 it is true, other political movements : Spain has had her civil wars, 

 England and Holland have had their colonial wars. But the recon- 

 struction of the map of Europe has depended upon the three changes 

 just mentioned. Let us take them in order. 



First — the creation of the German Empire. In the northern 



