"A Most Highly Polished and Effective Instrument in the Hands of God," With a Cosmic Mandate to Correct His Work

Accept what God hath wrought, you bitches, or the U.S. Army will come back and sort you out again

1907. Europe, confidence ascendant, marches proudly into the last seven years of the Long Peace that followed Bonaparte’s defeat at Waterloo and the settlement of national borders at the Congress of Vienna. The Edwardian Age it’s called by some, Late-Late Victorian by others. And should we not honor the great Queen whose name has come to represent that most glorious of epochs? And whose sons in that year ruled not only the Empire on which the sun never set (Edward VII) but the newly ascendant Germany (Kaiser Wilhelm), the Second Reich established by the work of the great von Bismarck in 1871, and the restless power to the East: Russia (Czar Nicholas II).

Is there a better image of Europe’s civilizational unity, the self-assurance that shrugged off nascent revolutionary movements, the culture that produced art, architecture, poetry and scholarship that captured the spiritual profundities of the European people? In 1907 one could travel from London via Paris to Berlin or Vienna and then …