THE NEW EUROPE
and 'constitutional' to the point of injustice. Provided that a minister obtained for him the 'necessities of the State' in the form of money and recruits he appeared to care little how heavily the policy of the minister might press in other respects upon whole sections of loyal subjects. Indeed, the bearing of Francis Joseph has sometimes resembled that of the landlord who ignores the petty tyranny exercised by his estate agent and dismisses the agent only when revenue falls off or disturbances occur. Francis Joseph has rarely borrowed trouble or insisted that the political action of his ministers must conform to private ethical standards."
These are "facts" which no fair-minded student of Habsburg affairs will gainsay. But they are facts which no Austrian or Hungarian with any public position or political ambition would have cared openly to express during Francis Joseph's lifetime. All, or almost all, public references to the monarch while he lived were perforce eulogistic. People abroad seem to have taken these eulogies at their face value, and to have had no thought for the conditions from which they arose. It was not until Francis Joseph committed the irreparable act which plunged Europe into war that the men and women of our generation remembered the estimate their fathers and grandfathers had formed of him, and began to wonder whether he had changed much after all.
He had not changed. Long experience had taught him that some things were difficult, some impossible, and some feasible if sufficient administrative pressure were applied or sufficient corruption employed. He remained throughout life the supreme opportunist, as regards method, in the service of an unchanging dynastic idea. He knew that to oppose Germany would be to court destruction; and though he sometimes restrained, he never opposed her or gave the Hohenzollerns a chance of tearing from him his German possessions. Deep in his heart lay a semi-fatalistic, semi-religious belief that the hour of the Habsburgs would strike once again and that they would once more hold sway in the lands of the German tongue. In order that the opportunity when it came might not be missed, he sold to the Magyars the non-Magyar half of Hungary, handed over to their tender mercies his loyal Croats, and refused justice to Bohemia. The support of the Poles he purchased by giving the Szlachta, or gentry, a free hand in Galicia, and resorted to a thousand
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