The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914

The proud tower built up through the great age of European civilization was an edifice of grandeur and passion, of riches and beauty and dark cellars. Its inhabitants lived, as compared to a later time, with more self-reliance, more confidence, more hope; greater magnificence, extravagance and elegance; more careless ease, more gaiety, more pleasure in each other's company and conversation, more injustice and hypocrisy, more misery and want, more sentiment including false sentiment, less sufferance of mediocrity, more dignity in work, more delight in nature, more zest. The Old World had much that has since been lost, whatever may have been gained. Looking back on it from 1915, Emile Verhaeren, the Belgian Socialist poet, dedicated his pages, "With emotion, to the man I used to be.

Mankind's tragedy is that he can draw up blueprints for a better life but he cannot live up to them.

Even the respectable have a small anarchist hidden on the inside.

Asked what would be his idea of Heaven, one statesman in 1897 said it would be to "receive a flow of telegrams alternating news of a British victory by sea and a British victory by land.

Of England's patrician class, the author writes: "It was easy to be agreeable when everything was done to keep them in comfort and ease.

The overpowering unimportance of this MAKES ME SPEECHLESS. – Speaker of the House of Representatives Thomas Reed

If it was bliss to be alive, to hunt was rapture.

I command, or I keep quiet." Napoleon

William McKinley was a man made to be managed.

If they are afraid of revision in the laboratory, truth will never be released except by accident.

In proportion that property is small, the danger of misusing the franchisee is great.

Advice to young Samuel Gompers that might apply in many other areas: "Learn from socialism, but don't join it.

Henry Adams, like most people, saw society in his own image.

He was the most persuasive speaker, less for his words than character behind them. He made every listener feel he had done his best to master every aspect of this question, who has been driven by logic to arrive at certain conclusions, and who is disguising from us no argument on either side.

Party animosity was concealed under a veil of studied courtesy.

Malignant phenomena do not come out of a golden age.

Without a country, you are the basket of humanity.

One aristocratic leader's club was known for, "an atmosphere of solemn tranquility, in which reading, dozing, and meditation took precedence over conversation.

The English patrician bloomed in his natural climate.

He accomplished wonders of diplomacy on the principle, never give way, and never give offense.

Talent for oratory can simulate the need for action and even thought.

Each one of us is serious individually, but together we become frivolous.

The scene is France. The theater is the world.

In committee at The Hague, Fisher behaved himself with surprising circumspection; unofficially he remained normal. “The humanizing of war!” he exploded. “You might just as well talk of humanizing Hell!

We have been misled by the people of the time themselves who, in looking back across the gulf of the War, see that earlier half of their lives misted over by a lovely sunset haze of peace and security. It did not seem so golden when they were in the midst of it.

Lloyd George’s Budget of 1909 was the fuse, deliberately lit, of one of the great quarrels which made the Liberal era, in the words of a participant, “so unprecedentedly cantankerous and uncomfortable.” With Liberal prestige sinking, party leaders were aware that without a popular issue they might not win the next election. People were already beginning to calculate, Gardiner wrote, “when the election would come and by how much the Liberals would lose.” As Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd George had to provide £16,000,000 of additional revenue for 1909, one-third toward the eight Dreadnoughts to which the Government had agreed, and two-thirds for implementing the Old Age Pensions Act.

Reporters, in the hope of eliciting a witticism, were always asking him for comments on the news of the day. They were not always successful. Asked to comment on a Papal message, he replied, “The overpowering unimportance of this makes me speechless.” Asked what was the greatest problem confronting the American people, he replied, “How to dodge a bicycle.