Seventy years ago a traveller, making an overland journey from Lisbon to Peking, would have traversed throughout the whole of his route the territories of states whose constitutions, however much they might differ, were all monarchical in form: Portugal, Spain, France, the German states, Russia and China. To-day all these countries are republics, as is Poland, the one additional state whose territory would now be crossed on such a journey.

Has the revolt against monarchy such characters as would point to its effecting a permanent change or will the fallen thrones be re-erected? In Asia republicanism is an exotic growth, but in Europe the system under which Athens and Rome grew to maturity is not so. On the eve of the American Revolution, but an insignificant fraction of mankind was living under republican institutions. These survived only in the old maritime Republics of Venice and Genoa, the Swiss cantons and the little republic of Ragusa in Eastern Europe. To these we may add the autonomous Hanse towns. The Netherlands were technically a republic, though in practice a constitutional monarchy, since the Stadtholdership was hereditary in the House of Orange, which intermarried with the reigning families of Europe. Sixteen years after the American Declaration of Independence the French monarchy fell. Animated by the crusading zeal which characterized the Soviets in the first years of their existence, the French republicans desired to impose their system of government on Europe. At one time it looked as though they might do so. Within a few years French arms had created the satellite Batavian, Helvetian, Cisalpine, Roman and Parthenopean Republics. But after a life of twelve years the First French Republic was destroyed by its Chief Magistrate and monarchy under a new dynasty was restored in France.