Présentation de l'éditeur :
Preface. The ten or twelve volumes of Alison s History of Europe about the war that raged with France, with but little intermission, from 1793 to 1815, occupy a well-deserved place of honour on most of our library shelves, or perhaps rather a place of repose. Alison spent fifteen years in preparing materials for his work, and fifteen more in composing it. His exhaustive narrative of the military details of the war enables a later writer, in covering the same ground, to deal with them only allusively, and to concentrate attention more on the political and diplomatic phases of the struggle than on the actual campaigns. The military interest of every war wanes with the generation that wages it, whilst its political aspects become of increasing interest to posterity. It was from knowledge of this fact that Napoleon once rightly predicted to his secretary Bourrienne that within two centuries of his time a mere half page of history would suffice for the narrative of all his campaigns. Posterity, content with a general knowledge of the $5 military results of the wars of its ancestors, turns to other questions about them. It desires to know more fully than contemporaries were able to know how such wars came to begin ;which country was responsible for them, or whether the blame for them was divisible among all the belligerents ;what statesmen or parties were to blame for their not having been sooner ended ;whether the pretexts for them are justified by the light of later and fuller knowledge ;and how far such wars, or their protraction, were necessary or expedient, or their professed aims their real ones. To satisfy curiosity on such points is here the main endeavour.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)
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