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As midnight approached, Florence's mayor, his council and his bell ringer toiled up the worn stairs of the medieval Bargello. Crowds in the piazza lapped around the corner past Dante's old house. Dancing stopped. Florentines, so seldom quiet, fell silent. The Bargello bell, captured from Pistoia in the 13th Century, was a marvel; it was not rung every Sunday or every New Year's but (such is the proud antiquity of Florence) every new century. It was also rung for the beginning and end of war. Florentines who that night hoped never to hear it peal for war would not be reassured by Education Minister Guidi Bacelli's statement next day. Public school curricula would be revised, he said, to put more emphasis on gymnastics, military drill and marksmanship.
Such exercises were no novelty in Berlin. Three weeks before the New Year Prince von Bülow had told the Reichstag: "In the coming century Germany will be either the hammer or the anvil." At midnight the Kaiser's court heard a 33-gun salute to the New Year, followed by a sermon on "the momentousness of the hour." All then repaired to the White Hall of the Royal Palace for a reception. Kaiserin Augusta Victoria wore a diamond necklace that had belonged to Peter the Great of Russia. Her sage-green moire gown had a ten-yard train of pink velvet borne by eight pages. The hall "was illuminated like fairyland and decorated with symbols typifying a bright future."
Sparks. The year that opened with the glitter of snow, diamonds and hope was to be relatively quiet—a year of intermission between the first and second acts of a great drama. Since 1848 certain fateful ideas and forces had been gathering momentum. Nationalism, capitalism, socialism, secularism were all clearly recognizable by 1900. Afterwards, in the second act, they were to combine and explode. In 1900 all knew that change was at hand, but it was to be gradual and upward, in accordance with popular conceptions of what Mr. Darwin's comforting theory of evolution meant in terms of human society. Few suspected the chasms ahead. Yet as 1900 unfolded, there were portents.
At Kitty Hawk Orville and Wilbur Wright were flying kite-like gliders, which led them three years later to the first powered flight of a heavier-than-air machine. It took some years for the world to realize that this ingenious toy had revolutionized war and peace.
A burning, bitter, sardonic young (30) exile, Lenin, was preparing in Germany the first issue of his paper, Iskra (The Spark), which was designed to quicken the class struggle in Russia. Its first issue dedicated Iskra to training "people who will devote to the revolution not only their spare evenings, but the whole of their lives." No periodical ever adhered more closely and successfully to its prospectus.
In South Africa, another revolutionary, Mohandas Gandhi, organized an ambulance corps of 1,100 Indians to help the British, in the Boer War, although his personal sympathies lay with the Boers. He reasoned that he must stand by the Empire because progress for Indians could come only within the Empire.