For Austria this period was bound up with the name of Metternich, who personified the old hide-bound methods of the bureaucracy, the diplomacy of a past age, to which the nations were mere pawns on a chessboard.  Under him the “Police-State” assumed its most perfect form, a form not even surpassed by Russia from 1881 to 1905.

Then came the year 1848, when the dams burst.  The Hungarian constitution, restored in its entirety, became for a time the watchword and inspirer of the movement, while Austria for the first time received a serious constitution.  Unhappily the issue between Reaction and Progress was not a clear one.  The Magyars in Hungary unquestionably stood for historic development and constitutional rights, but they also stood for racial hegemony, for the forcible assimilation of all the other races, for a unitary Magyar State instead of the old polyglot Hungary.  They thus drove all the other races to coalesce with the dynasty and the forces of reaction.  The result was a violent racial war, with all kinds of excesses.  Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, Roumanians, Saxons, all fought against the Magyars, and finally the scale was turned by the Russian troops who poured across the Carpathians in the name of outraged autocracy.

There followed the inevitable reaction, which again can be best summed up in two phrases—­that of Prince Felix Schwarzenberg, “Austria will astonish the world by her ingratitude,” so strikingly fulfilled in the Crimean War, when Austria left Russia in the lurch; and that of a Hungarian patriot, “The other races have received as reward what we Magyars receive as punishment.”  In short, the statesmen of Vienna, untaught by experience, reverted to the old bureaucratic and absolutist regime.

For ten years (1849-1859) this endured—­Clericalism rampant, financial ruin, stagnation everywhere.  Then Nationality burst its bonds once more.  The war with Napoleon III. ended in Austria’s loss of Lombardy and the creation of the Italian kingdom.  Faced by the bankruptcy of the whole political and financial system, Francis Joseph launched into a period of constitutional experiment.  Following the line of least resistance, as throughout his long reign, he inclined now to federalism, now to centralism, and he was still experimenting when the war of 1866 broke out.  For Austria this war was decisive, for its results were her final expulsion both from Germany and from Italy, and the creation of that fatal Dual System which has distorted her whole subsequent development.

Under the Ausgleich or Compromise of 1867 the Dual Monarchy is composed of two equal and separate States, the Empire of Austria and the Kingdom of Hungary, each possessing a distinct parliament and cabinet of its own, but both sharing between them the three Joint Ministries of Foreign Affairs, War, and Finance.  The chiefs of these three offices are equally responsible to both Delegations, which are committees of the two Parliaments, sitting alternately in Vienna and Budapest, but acting quite independently of each other.