雙語+MP3|美國學生世界歷史81 三張新郵票

81
Three New Postage Stamps
三張新郵票

     LET us look backward a minute to see what had been going on in Europe since the time of Napoleon.
     After Napoleon was sent to Elba, the French had to have another ruler. They wanted their old kings back again. The family name of their old kings was Bourbon, and the French thought they ought to have a Bourbon ruler over them. Accordingly they tried out three Bourbons-one after the other-all relatives of their last king, whom they had beheaded.
     All of them proved no good. The French people had given the Bourbon family a good tryout, and so at last they stopped worrying with kings and started another republic.
     Now, a republic has a president instead of a king, so the people had to choose a president; and whom do you suppose they picked out? Why, the nephew of Napoleon. The nephew of Napoleon was named Louis Napoleon. He had planned and plotted again and again to make himself king of France, but again and again he had failed. And now he was elected president! But Louis Napoleon didn't want to be only president. He wanted to be like his uncle the great Napoleon. He dreamed of being emperor and conquering Europe, and so it was not long after this before he had himself made emperor, and called himself Napoleon III.
     Napoleon III was jealous of the neighboring country of Prussia. It was getting to be too strong, he thought. Prussia had a king at this time named William who was very able himself, and he had an able assistant or prime minister named Bismarck, who was looking for an excuse to fight France. Presently a war was started between the two countries in 1870. Napoleon soon found he had made a bad mistake in picking the war with Prussia. Prussia was not getting too strong; it was already too strong.
     Napoleon III was completely beaten by Prussia, and he with a large army had to surrender. Then in disgrace he went to live in England.
     The Prussians marched into Paris and made the French agree to pay them a billion dollars. When some of the French towns said they couldn't pay, Bismarck lined up the leading citizens of the place and told them they would be shot if they didn't raise the money that was demanded. France paid, and, to the wonder and amazement of everybody, they paid this immense sum in two years' time. But it took France a long time to forget the way they were made to pay and the way they were treated by the Prussians, and for a long time there was deadly enmity between these two countries. This war was called the Franco- Prussian War, as it was between France and Prussia.
     There were a number of little countries near Prussia. They were called German states. But though their people were related and spoke the same language, the countries or states were separate. As a result of the war, Prussia was able to join all these German states together and to make for the first time one big, strong, powerful nation called Germany, feared by other countries on account of its great army of fighting men. William was made emperor of all Germany and called kaiser. He was crowned in the French palace that Louis XIV had built at Versailles.
     The French thought the Germans had been able to win this war because they had public schools in which all their children were trained and because of the way their soldiers were drilled. So France set to work and started public schools everywhere in France and imitated the German way of drilling their army so that they would be prepared in the next war.
     France became a republic with a president and an assembly chosen by the people. The French wanted no more emperors.
     At that time Italy was not a single country as it is now. It was a collection of small states, as Germany had been. Some of these were independent some were owned by France; some were owned by Austria. The king of one of these Italian states was Victor Emmanuel. He wanted all the Italian states to unite and become one single country like our United States. He was helped by his prime minister, a very able man named Cavour, and by a rough but romantic popular hero named Garibaldi, who was called the Hero of the Red Shirt.
     Garibaldi, who had been a candlemaker in New York City, was always poor and seemed not to care for money. He was so popular that whenever he called for soldiers to fight with him for his beloved Italy, they at once flocked around him, ready to fight to the death.
     At last these three, Victor Emmanuel, Cavour, and Garibaldi, succeeded in making their country one big nation. The Italians erected monuments to them and named streets after them. To honor Victor Emmanuel, they built a magnificent building on a hill in Rome overlooking the city, a building that was intended to be more beautiful than anything built in Athens during the time of Pericles, or in Italy during the Renaissance.
     If you collect postage stamps it would be interesting for you to get, if you can, stamps of these countries at that time, the New French Republic, United Germany, and United Italy.