Go back fifty years in time and you are in a world which seems as remote as the age of the dinosaurs, which in some ways it indeed resembles; the age of the imperial dynasties which ruled a great part of Europe, rigid and wholly static anachronisms which had somehow survived into a time whose intense dynamism was altogether too much for them. Confronting the inevitable changes of the modern world, these dynasties could do nothing but try, with desperate incompetence, to repress all change. They thereby brought on, in 1914, an explosion which destroyed them utterly and left the world in a turmoil from which it has not yet emerged.

There were four of those dynasties—Hohenzollerns, Hapsburgs, Romanovs, and Ottomans—and their empires had four hundred million subjects. Two of them, in Russia and in Turkey, were undisguised absolutisms in which the will of the sovereign was the only law; the other two had a thin veneer of parliamentary institutions but were almost equally autocratic in their essential structure. Not only were they incapable of adjusting themselves; they were visibly decaying, and one of the things that made the final explosion so inevitable and so terrible was the fact that the internal tensions of the autocracies crossed the external tensions which racked the whole international order. Even the most enlightened leadership would have been hard pressed to cope with the age of rising nationalism, twentieth-century technologies, and the unsatisfied demands of the common man, who had heard about Democracy. The leadership provided by the dynasties would have been substandard even by the values of Louis XIV. So the world blew up.

Nineteen fourteen: that was the break-off point. It opens the most fateful story of our time, and we are just beginning to see it. Nothing else that has happened to us for a thousand years quite matches this. We are the heirs of a wrecked society, of a broken continuity, of an age that collapsed just when we were most sure of it. Furthermore, the collapse was one of the most horrendous catastrophes in human history, a tragedy so vast that it left the emotions numb and so paved the way for future infamies. Ours is the incredible century. It opened brightly as an era whose institutions, even though they obviously needed an overhaul, at least seemed to be stable; in hardly more than a decade these institutions had come down in utter ruin, and the story would be beyond belief if we did not have the most compelling reasons to know that every word of it is true.

The Fall of the Dynasties, by Edmond Taylor. Doubleday & Co. 421 pp. $6.50.

There is at hand now a good account of the way the disaster came upon us, in Edmond Taylor’s book The Fall of the Dynasties . Mr. Taylor examines the years from 1905 to 1922 and makes a valiant attempt to