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Napoleon, prior to his demand for the hand of the archduchess Maria Louisa, had sued for that of the grandduchess Anna, sister to the emperor Alexander, who was then in her sixteenth year, but, being refused by her mother, the empress Maria, a princess of Wurtemberg, and Alexander delaying a decisive answer, he formed an alliance with the Habsburg.
The establishment of the new Polish element as a third factor with Austria-Hungary in our constitutional organism would represent an element so unsafe, and would be combined with such risks for the further development of the policy of the Habsburg Great Power, that, in view of the position of the Monarchy as such, I should feel the greatest anxiety lest the new and unreliable Russian-Polish element, so different from us in many respects, should play too predominant a part.
The grandduchy of Tuscany and the duchies of Modena, Parma, and Placentia were, moreover, restored to the collateral branches of the house of Habsburg. Prussia received half of Saxony, the grand-duchy of Posen, Swedish-Pomerania, a great portion of Westphalia, and almost the whole of the Lower Rhine from Mayence as far as Aix-la-Chapelle.
There is reason to believe that one clause obliged the Roumanian Government to come to the support of the Habsburg Monarchy with all its military resources in case that empire should be wantonly attacked by another Power.
Naturally it appeared that the function of the republic in the progress of the world was to till its own garden, and to afford a haven of refuge to the oppressed and impoverished who poured in from all lands; and this idea was strengthened by the great number of immigrants who were driven to the New World by the failure of the successive European revolutions of the nineteenth century, and by the oppressive tyranny of the Habsburg monarchy and the Russian despots.
In putting forward his Fourteen Points Mr. Wilson obviously felt the necessity of settling the world problem of nationality and recognised that the Habsburg Monarchy, once arranged and settled, could serve as a model to the world, as hitherto it had afforded a terrifying example.
Habsburg and Holstein; Northumberland, Vere, and Westmoreland; Fairfax and Stuart; Bourbon, Chatillon, and Lorraine; Bentivoglio, Farnese, Spinola, Grimaldi, Arragon, Toledo, Avila, Berlaymont, Bucquoy, Nassau, Orange, Solms such were the historic names of a few only of the pupils or professors in that sanguinary high school, mingled with the plainer but well known patronymics of the Baxes, Meetkerkes, Van Loons, Marquettes, Van der Meers, and Barendrechts, whose bearers were fighting, as they long had fought, for all that men most dearly prize on earth, and not to win honour or to take doctors' degrees in blood.
This marriage had a double object; that of raising an heir to his broad empire, his first wife, Josephine Beauharnais, whom he divorced, having brought him no children, and that of legitimating his authority and of obliterating the stain of low birth by intermingling his blood with that of the ancient race of Habsburg.
The yearly revenues of the whole monarchy of the Imperial house of Habsburg can scarcely be stated at a higher figure than L350,000. Thus the political game for it was a game was by no means a desperate one for the Netherlands, nor the resources of the various players so unequally distributed as at first sight it might appear.
The Palatinate, in western Germany, was plundered twenty-eight times. And a population of eighteen million people was reduced to four million. The hostilities began almost as soon as Ferdinand II of the House of Habsburg had been elected Emperor. He was the product of a most careful Jesuit training and was a most obedient and devout son of the Church.
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