his dynasty and himself. His next chief care is for his army, which is and must be the prop of his dynasty and foreign policy. So long as a minister provides money and recruits, Francis Joseph troubles not at all how heavily his policy and actions may press upon his subjects. At the best he is comparable only to the meanest of rackrenting absentee landlords, who, away from the scene of operations, has an agent there whose duty it is to bleed to the utmost an impoverished tenancy. Away from the scene of operations, that is to say, deliberately out of touch with the lives of his peoples, Francis Joseph has always thought and acted solely from the dynastic point of view, obsessed with the idea that his dynasty stands apart from the common herd of mankind as a divinely appointed governing and possessing institution. He feels that ultimately everything with which he is concerned and which he directs must turn out for the best and so he need not go out of his way at all to ameliorate conditions, or remedy wrongs, or relieve oppressions, or do anything except repress revolt and revolution.
Strictly speaking, there is no Hapsburg State save in the sense that a Hapsburg monarch can without serious exaggeration say, "L'État c'est moi! "
This is not the place nor is there space to describe in detail the constitution of the Dual Monarchy. What it ultimately amounts to, in fact, has already been indicated. The Parliaments to which we have already alluded are nothing more than mixtures of debating societies and legislative registry offices. At the best they are merely vents for the futile outbursts occasionally of some popular feeling. In the Dual Monarchy names and constitutions count for little. The force behind, however—that is, the Hapsburg dynasty—counts for very much. This is the secret of Hapsburg methods.
At the same time it may be useful to give an illustration of parliamentary helplessness in a case where, as in the Hungarian Parliament, representative government, so far as it goes, expresses itself the most effectively in the Dual Monarchy. The majority returned at the Hungarian general election in 1905 declined to take office unless the Emperor Francis Joseph should acquiesce in some curtailment of his constitutional military prerogative. The monarch thereupon threatened that unless this majority withdrew its demands he would, of his own will and with his own power, re-arrange the franchise so that it would put an end to the party, as a ruling power, which the majority represented. In a spirit of irritated condescension, Francis Joseph granted an audience to some delegates of that majority. The audience lasted about
