Political Considerations of Vienna Period
Old Austria more than any other state was dependent on the greatness of its leadership. For in it the foundation-stone of a national state was lacking: a people, the basis of a national state, has still a preservative power, no matter how bad its leadership is. Thanks to the natural inertia of its inhabitants and their consequent resisting power, a unified national state can often survive astonishingly long periods of the worst administration or leadership without being inwardly destroyed. A body of this sort often seems to have no further life at all, as if it were dead and done for, when suddenly the supposed corpse rises up again, and furnishes the rest of mankind with astonishing signs of its indestructible vital force.
Not so an empire composed of unlike peoples, maintained not by common blood but by a common strong arm. Here any weakness in governing leads not to hibernation of the state, but to an awakening of all the individual instincts which are present in the blood, although unable to develop under a dominant will. Only centuries of common education, common tradition, common interest, etc., can reduce the danger. Hence state structures of this sort depend the more upon the greatness of their leadership the younger they are; in fact the work of outstanding figures of force and intellectual heroes often collapses again immediately after the death of the great, lonely founder. But even after centuries these dangers cannot be considered overcome. They are sleeping, often only to awake suddenly the moment weakness of common leadership and the force of education, the grandeur of tradition, are no longer strong enough to overcome the impetus of the native life force in the various races.
Not to have grasped this is the perhaps tragic fault of the House of Hapsburg.
For one of them alone did Fate once more hold the torch over the future of his country; then it was extinguished forever.
In fleeting alarm Joseph II, Roman Emperor of the German Nation, saw how his house, driven to the outermost edge of the Empire, was bound some day to disappear in the maelstrom of a Babylon of people unless all that his fathers had failed to do
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