moderate display of that prudence which is said to be the chief virtue of an aristocracy, to secure all they possessed,—­which was all the country had to give,—­and to prepare the way for such gains as it might be found necessary to make, as the American nation should increase in strength.  But this prudence the slaveholders would not display.  They annoyed and insulted the people of the Free States.  They broke up the Democratic party, which was well disposed to do their work.  They pursued such a course as compelled the great majority of the American people to take up arms against them, and to abolish slavery by an act of war.  The effect was the fall of a body of men who certainly were very powerful, and who were believed to be very wise in their generation.  It was impossible to attack them as long as they were true to their own interests, and they could fall only through being attacked.  They made war on the nation, and the nation was forced to defend herself, and destroyed them.  It is the most wonderful case of suicide known to mankind.

The Austrian aristocracy behaved almost as unwisely as the American aristocracy.  As the Republic of the United States is a union of States, which in reality was governed by the slaveholders down to 1861, so is the Austrian Empire a collection of countries, governed by a few great families, at the head of which stand the imperial family,—­the House of Austria, or, as it is now generally called, the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine.  That aristocracy might have prevented the occurrence of war last summer, by ceding Venetia to Italy; and that it did not make such cession early in June, when we know it was ready to make it early in July, but plunged into a contest which, according to the apologists for its terrible defeat, it was wholly unprepared to wage, speaks but poorly for its prudence, though that is claimed to be the virtue of aristocracies.  The Austrian aristocrats behaved as senselessly in 1866 as the Prussian aristocrats in 1806, but with less excuse than the latter had.  By their action they caused their country’s degradation.  From the rank of a first-rate power that country has been compelled to descend, not so much through loss of territory and population as through loss of position.  For centuries the house of Austria has been very powerful in Europe, though the Austrian empire can count but sixty years.  Rudolph of Hapsburg, the first member of his line who rose to great eminence, in the latter part of the thirteenth century, founded the house of Austria.  While holding the imperial throne, he obtained for his own family Austria, Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola; but it was not till several generations after his death, and in the fifteenth century, that the imperial dignity became virtually, though not in terms, hereditary in the Hapsburg line.  For several centuries, down to the extinction of the office, there was no Emperor of Germany who was not of that family.  Every effort to divert the office from that house ended