uchies, essentially German,
which comprised the ancestral possessions of the Hapsburg dynasty; in
the north was Bohemia, comprising, besides Bohemia proper, Silesia,
and Moravia, and containing a population largely Czech; to the south
lay the lately acquired Italian kingdom of Lombardo-Venetia; to the
east lay the kingdom of Hungary, including the kingdom of Croatia and
the principality of Transylvania, with a population preponderantly
Slavic but dominated politically by the Magyars. Several of these
component states retained privileges which were peculiar to themselves
and were bound to the Hapsburg monarchy by ties that were at best
precarious. And the differences everywhere of race, religion,
language, tradition, and interest were such as to create for the
Vienna Government a seemingly impossible task.

So decadent and ineffective was the Austrian administrative system
when Metternich entered, in 1809, upon his ministry that not even he
could have supposed that change would not eventually have to come.
Change, however, he dreaded, because when change begins it is not
possible to foresee how far it will go, or to control altogether the
course it shall follow. Change, therefore, Metternich resisted by
every available means, putting off at least as long as might be the
evil day. The spirit of liberalism, once disseminated throughout the
conglomerate Empire, might be expected to prompt the various
nationalities to demand constitutions; constitutions would mean
autonomy; and autonomy might well mean the end of the Empire itself.
Austria entered upon the post-Napoleonic period handicapped by the
fact that the principle upon which Europe during the nineteenth
century was to solve many of her problems--the principle of
nationality--contained for her nought but the menace of
disintegration. Conservatism, as one writer has put it, was imposed
upon the Empire by the very conditions of its being.

*499. Metternich's System: the Rise of Liberalism.*--The key to Austrian
history during the period 1815--1848 is, then, the maxim of the
Emperor Francis, "Govern and change nothing." In Hungary government
was nominally constitutional; elsewhere it was frankly absolute. (p. 452)
The diets of the component parts of the Empire were not abolished, nor
were the estates of the several Austrian provinces. But, constituted
as they generally were on an aristocratic basis and convened but
irregularly and for brief periods, their existence wa