The only State whose frontiers have not altered during this period is Switzerland, and even that country seized the opportunity which a disturbed Europe offered her in 1848, to substitute a unified federal system for the constitution imposed upon her in 1815.
The rest of the area falls into six sections: (1) The kingdom of the Netherlands, containing the two distinct and often antagonistic nations, Belgium and Holland; (2) the German nationality split up into no less than thirty-eight[2] sovereign States, loosely held together in a "confederation"; (3) the Italian nationality, distributed under eight independent governments, including four duchies, two kingdoms, the Papal States, and the provinces under Austrian rule; (4) the Polish nationality, divided up between the three Powers, Prussia, Russia, and Austria; (5) the Austrian Empire, comprising a dozen distinct nationalities; and (6) the Ottoman Empire, in which at least five different Christian peoples groaned beneath the sway of the Mohammedan Turk.

Thus, if we may regard the inhabitants of the southern Netherland provinces, for the moment, as of one nationality, there were roughly ten great nationalities, the Germans, the Italians, the Belgians, the Poles, the Bohemians, the Hungarians, the Southern Slavs, the Rumanians, the Bulgarians, and the Greeks, all left with national aspirations unsatisfied, all hampered by State frontiers which had no correspondence with their natural boundaries.

Can we wonder that there have been wars in the nineteenth century?
Should we not rather wonder that those wars have not been greater and more numerous?
For the Congress of the Powers in 1814 having failed to give the nationalities what they wanted, nothing remained for them but to seize it for themselves.

The only alternative to settlement by conference is "blood and iron," and it is with "blood and iron" that nearly every nationality which has attained nationhood in the last hundred years has cemented the structure of its State.
[Footnote 2: Napoleon had succeeded in reducing the number from 360 to 38.] It is not our purpose in the present chapter to deal with the whole of this vast area; the three eastern sections, Poland, the Austrian Empire, and Turkey, present special problems of their own, and therefore need special treatment.

Still less do we intend to write a history of the nineteenth century, or even to adhere to a chronological treatment.