EUROPE BETWEEN THE ACTS

Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Thursday, June 10, 1880

FromThe Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 24

EUROPE BETWEEN THE ACTS.

Not the least striking feature of the present European situation is the fact that all the men who control it, and who are struggling so energetically to maintain that control, are so far advanced in years as to preclude all hope of their living to see their cherished schemes realized. Prince Bismarck is 65, Prince Gortschakoff 82, Lord Beaconsfield 74, the Czar 62, the Emperor William 83. Yet these graybeards are still as eager as boys in the pursuit of their several objects, and amid the present pause between two acts of the great political drama, the din and bustle of preparation are audible enough. England is shaking herself free from the circus policy of her charlatan Premier. France is renewing her anti-Jesuit war of 1845. Italy is building monster iron-clads, not without thoughts of Trieste and the Austrian seaboard generally. Greece is fuming over the still unsettled “frontier question.” Turkey, true to her time-honored creed of promising everything and performing nothing, is making every effort not to carry out the reforms to which she has pledged herself. . . . Russia is standing on her guard, with one eye bent on the Nihilists and the other on Herat. Austria, divided between her fears of Russia and her hopes of fresh booty in Turkey, is stooping to conciliate the despised Roumanians, and to clasp the hand that struck her down in 1866; while Germany, sliding back foot by foot into the pipe-clayed despotism of Frederick the Great, is laying fresh burdens on her overtaxed people, “to promote national interests,” and preaching peace and good-will toward men from the mouths of 30,000 additional breech-loaders.—N. Y. Sunday Times.