acy, backed by the weight of the Habsburg power beyond the borders of
Germany, would exercise a greater influence than any possible prestige
derived from a venerable title that had become a by-word for the union of
unlimited pretensions with practical impotence. Moreover, to the refusal to
revive the Empire--which shattered so many patriotic hopes in
Germany--Austria added another decision yet more fateful. By relinquishing
her claim to the Belgian provinces and other outlying territories in
western Germany, and by acquiescing in the establishment of Prussia in the
Rhine provinces, she abdicated to Prussia her position as the bulwark of
Germany against France, and hastened the process of her own gravitation
towards the Slavonic East to which the final impetus was given in 1866.

[Sidenote: Internal affairs of Austria under Francis II. and Metternich.]

In order to understand the foreign policy of Austria, inseparably
associated with the name of Metternich, during the period from the close of
the congress of Vienna to the outbreak of the revolutions of 1848, it is
necessary to know something of the internal conditions of the monarchy
before and during this time. In 1792 Leopold II. had been succeeded by his
son Francis II. His popular designation of "our good Kaiser Franz" this
monarch owed to a certain simplicity of address and _bonhomie_ which
pleased the Viennese, certainly not to his serious qualities as a ruler. He
shared to the full the autocratic temper of the Habsburgs, their
narrow-mindedness and their religious and intellectual obscurantism; and
the qualities which would have made him a kindly, if somewhat tyrannical,
father of a family, and an excellent head clerk, were hardly those required
by the conditions of the Austrian monarchy during a singularly critical
period of its history.

The personal character of the emperor, moreover, gained a special
importance owing to the modifications that were made in the administrative
system of the empire. This had been originally organized in a series of
departments: Aulic chanceries for Austria, for Hungary and Transylvania, a
general Aulic chamber for finance, domains, mines, trade, post, &c., an
Aulic council [v.03 p.0013] of war, a general directory of accounts, and a
chancery of the household, court and state. The heads of all these
departments had the rank of secretaries of state and met in council under
the royal presidency. In course of time, however, this body