The 19th century produced a phenomenon unheard of in the annals of Western civilization, namely, a hundred years' peace - 1815 - 1914. Apart from the Crimean War - a more or less colonial event - England, France, Prussia, Austria, Italy and Russia were engaged in war among each other for altogether only eighteen months. A computation of comparable figures for the two preceding centuries gives an average of sixty to seventy years of major wars in each. But even the fiercest of nineteenth-century conflagrations, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, ended after less than a year's duration with the defeated nation being able to pay over an unheard-of sum as an indemnity without any disturbance of the currencies involved.