Page:The League of Nations in history.djvu/6

 that solution of the problem, and presented it under the modern form of how to create peace out of the conflict of national or dynastic ambitions.

The national State emerged from the Middle Ages under the guise and guidance of personal monarchy and amid the clash of religious wars which followed upon the break -down of Catholic unity under the Papacy. But Wars of Religion, despite the proverbial bitterness of theological hatred, proved more amenable to pacific treatment than dynastic or commercial rivalry; and, owing either to the competition of these other antagonisms or to the realization that war after all could not solve theological problems, the era of religious wars closed in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia. But the ink was hardly dry on that treaty of peace when two Protestant republics, England and Holland, flew at one another's throats over the carrying-trade of the world, and the city of London responded to the cry delenda est Carthago in the interests of the Navigation Acts. The combatants paid the price for their strife in the common terror with which the dynastic ambition of Louis XIV soon inspired them, and that danger was only laid, after a generation of European war, at the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.

The cost of these wars had by now begun to produce some impression on the minds of men. Efforts, indeed, had long been made to limit the injury and the suffering they involved, and early in the seventeenth