has enjoyed a charmed life. She has waxed vigorous under the weight and tonnage of crushing catastrophes, and this buoyancy has been due to no other sufficient cause than the esteem borne to her reigning house by men who, otherwise, would detest her name only a little less than they detest each other.
This assertion is worth a word of proof. It was at the opening of the seventeenth century that the House of Hapsburg at Vienna seemed to have grown really powerful, and prepared itself for the discharge of its historical mission, the union of Germany under itself. Now that so many other peoples had formed themselves into strong organisations, it was high time for Germany to do the same. Yet from that moment the House of Hapsburg committed a series of blunders so enormous as to begin by ruining Germany in the Thirty Years' War, and to end, in 1870, by enabling the once obscure state of Prussia to seize the headship of the whole. In the phrase of Bismarck, "Austria did my work."
Frederick the Great once remarked of the Emperor Joseph II. that he always took the second step before he had taken the first. In order to make that remark true of the politics of the House of Hapsburg, it would perhaps be right to add that the second step was, on capital occasions, usually the wrong one. For example, the Austrian Hapsburgs had displayed toleration towards the creeds produced by the Reformation up to the
