“Universal expectation has perhaps never been raised to such a pitch,” wrote the Prussian statesman, Frederick von Gentz, of the Congress of Vienna assembled one hundred and twenty-eight years ago to bring peace to a Europe overrun by Napoleon Bonaparte. War-weary peoples looked forward to an “all-embracing reform of the political system of Europe,” to “guarantees of universal peace”; in a word, to “the return of the golden age.” But the “real purpose of the Congress was to divide amongst the conquerors the spoils taken from the vanquished.” Well might these words describe the deep longings of the peoples and the objectives of most statesmen one hundred years later at Paris. And again, today, there is universal expectation of an all-embracing reform of the political system, not of Europe alone but of the entire world, which will herald a just and durable peace. Will the hopes of the peoples, especially of the darker peoples, be realized or will the Peace Congress convened at the end of this global war have as its ulterior purpose the division of the spoils of the vanquished and a return as near as possible to the status quo ante bellum?