The republic fought several wars. That with Mexico settled boundary disputes. The Civil War between the North and the South resulted in the abolition of slavery and made the country a united whole, no State having a right to secede from the rest. The war with Spain freed Cuba and other Spanish possessions in the western hemisphere. But none of these wars changed the system of government of the country. The United States was still the great republic during all the eventful happenings of the Nineteenth Century. Meantime what had happened in France? Louis Philippe had shown himself in his true lights as a Bourbon, had been driven from his throne, and had been followed by various kinds of government. A new Napoleon, the nephew of the first one, had come into power, had made himself Emperor as Napoleon III., and had tried to restore the glories of the First Empire. For a time France seemed to prosper under his rule, but it came to a sudden end when the King of Prussia defeated the armies of France in 1871 and drove Napoleon III. into exile. France lost her provinces of Alsace and Lorraine and William I. of Prussia was proclaimed Emperor of Germany in the great hall of Versailles. There followed in Paris the days of the Commune, which almost equaled the Reign of Terror for lawlessness. Gradually order was evolved under a new constitution with a President at the head of the government, and ever since France has been a real republic. From much turmoil and bloodshed she had won the liberty that Lafayette had dreamed of. Other countries in Europe had won independence too. England required no revolution; by peaceful means she grew more liberal; her sovereign became largely a figurehead, and the House of Commons, elected by the people, was the real seat of government. Italy, which in Lafayette’s time was mainly a collection of small kingdoms and duchies, ruled by Austrian archdukes or by the Pope, united under the leadership of Victor Emmanuel, the King of Savoy, drove out the Austrians, deprived the Papacy of its temporal power, and became a nation under a constitutional king. The west of Europe was really republican, like the United States; it was only in the east that the ideas of feudalism still held sway. Russia had her Czar, an autocrat of the worst type, Turkey her Sultan, a relic of the Dark Ages, Austria her Hapsburg Emperor, a thorough Bourbon, who learned nothing and forgot nothing. And Germany had her Hohenzollern and Prussian Emperor, the descendant of a long line of autocratic rulers, the sovereign made by Bismarck, “the man of blood and iron,” the stanch believer in the old doctrine of the divine right of kings. Germany had become an empire by the power of the sword, and her Emperor never allowed his people to forget that fact.