tisfaction was perhaps best epitomized by the celebration in 1897
of Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee, a parade that rolled for hours
through the streets of London, with an imperial panoply and display of
military power far surpassing anything attempted in past civilizations.

As the century began, there were few, whatever their degree of social or
moral sensitivity, who perceived the catastrophes lying ahead, and few, if
any, who could have conceived their magnitude. The military leadership of
most European nations assumed that war of some kind would break out, but
viewed the prospect with equanimity because of the twin fixed convictions
that it would be short and would be won by their side. To an extent that
seemed little short of miraculous, the international peace movement was
enlisting the support of statesmen, industrialists, scholars, the media,
and influential personalities as unlikely as the tsar of Russia. If the
inordinate increase in armaments seemed ominous, the network of
painstakingly crafted and often overlapping alliances seemed to give
assurance that a general conflagration would be avoided and regional
disputes settled, as they had been through most of the previous century.
This illusion was reinforced by the fact that Europe's crowned heads--most
of them members of one extended family, and many of them exercising
seemingly decisive political power--addressed one another familiarly by
nicknames, carried on an intimate correspondence, married one another's
sisters and daughters, and vacationed together throughout long stretches
of each year at one another's castles, regattas and shooting lodges. Even
the painful disparities in the distribution of wealth were being
energetically--if not very systematically--addressed in Western societies
through legislation designed to restrain the worst of the corporate
freebooting of preceding decades and to meet the most urgent demands of
growing urban populations.

The vast majority of the human family, living in lands outside the Western
world, shared in few of the blessings and little of the optimism of their
European and American brethren. China, despite its ancient civilization
and its sense of itself as the "Middle Kingdom", had become the hapless
victim of plundering by Western nations and by its modernizing neighbour
Japan. The multitudes in India--whose economy and political life had fallen
so totally under the domination of a single imperial power as to excl