The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922

by Edmond Taylor

“Nations and Empires, crowned with princes and potentates, rose majestically on every side, lapped in the accumulated treasures of the long peace,” he wrote in The World Crisis. “All were fitted and fastened, it seemed securely, into an immense cantilever. The two mighty European systems faced each other glittering and clanking in their panoply, but with a tranquil gaze. A polite, discrete, pacific, and on the whole sincere diplomacy spread its web of connections over both. A sentence in a dispatch, an observation by an ambassador, a cryptic phrase in parliament seemed sufficient to adjust from day to day the balance of the prodigious structure ... The old world, in its sunset, was fair to see.”

Winston Churchill