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The high imperial heart had ceased to beat, the house of Hapsburg had come to an end, and Joseph II., of the house of Hapsburg-Lorraine, was the sovereign ruler of Austria. By DR. HEINRICH GEFFCKEN Edmund Burke, the great British politician, and one of the greatest political philosophers that ever lived, was born at Dublin, January 1, 1730, as son of a petty attorney.
That is the next question we must answer before we can hope to understand the causes of the present war in their entirety. Austria, or, more strictly speaking, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, means no more than the congeries of States governed each separately and all in combination by the head of the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine.
The Emperor, Francis II., head of the house of Hapsburg-Lorraine, who was born February 12, 1768, had just entered his forty-third year; consequently, he was only eighteen months older than his son-in-law, the Emperor Napoleon, who was born August 15, 1769.
Such was the way in which the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine, that had done much in Tuscany to win respect if not love, destroyed all its rights to the goodwill of the Tuscan people, and removed what might have been a serious obstacle to Italian unity.
The house of Hapsburg-Lorraine having by treachery, perjury, and levying of war against the Hungarian nation, as well as by its outrageous violation of all compacts, in breaking up the integral territory of the kingdom, in the separation of Transylvania, Croatia, Slavonia, Fiume, and its districts, from Hungary further, by compassing the destruction of the independence of the country by arms, and by calling in the disciplined army of a foreign power, for the purpose of annihilating its nationality, by violation both of the Pragmatic Sanction and of treaties concluded between Austria and Hungary, on which the alliance between the two countries depended is, as treacherous and perjured, for ever excluded from the throne of the united states of Hungary and Transylvania, and all their possessions and dependencies, and are hereby deprived of the style and title, as well as of the armorial bearings belonging to the crown of Hungary, and declared to be banished for ever from the united countries and their dependencies and possessions.
The French public detested the Austrian alliance into which Madame de Pompadour had dragged France, and had felt the smart of national disgrace during the Seven Years' War, so that a marriage into the Hapsburg-Lorraine family after the conclusion of that war, was very ill received.
With him ended the male line of the mighty family, but the descendants of his daughter and her husband, the Duke of Lorraine, were known as the house of Hapsburg-Lorraine, and gradually the second name disappeared from common usage, leaving only the more famous half.
The complexity of the various sections which make up the realm of the present Emperor Francis Joseph, the present head of the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine, would be only confusing if it were detailed in so general a description as this. We must be content with the broad lines of the thing, which are as follows:
Her main support without which she could not have challenged Europe was that very power whose sole reason for being was Catholicism: the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine which, from Vienna, controlled and consolidated the Catholic against the Orthodox Slav: the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine was the champion of Catholic organization in Eastern Europe. The Catholic Irish largely stood apart.
These two other factors are, first, the position and tradition of Prussia among the German States; secondly, the peculiar authority exercised by the Imperial House of Hapsburg-Lorraine at Vienna over its singularly heterogeneous subjects.
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