ABSTRACT
The defeat of Napoleon was followed by a long period of peace among the Great Powers—a peace moreover that was only in part one of exhaustion. It opened with the attempt of the Great Powers of Europe to make a constructive agreement for peace, the greatest attempt ever made in the history of Europe to this date, an attempt of such importance that it may properly be regarded as beginning a new era of European relationships. The breakdown of this international experiment must not blind us to the magnitude of its results. There was no great war in Europe for a century and no major war until 1853; the territorial settlement remained the political basis of Europe for thirty years; the system of government by congress, destroyed before the end of the first decade, left as a tradition behind it the practice of international conferences, inherited by the twentieth century from the nineteenth.
