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It is true that at that time Kracow had not yet been declared in a state of siege by M. Pouilly de Mensdorf, but, as a personal friend of the Czar, he had then held Galicia and Kracow during the past year under a more uncertain condition than even the declaration of a state of siege would have produced.
A wise statesman would probably have made terms with one or the other. He would have either surrendered Venetia, which was really a source of weakness, to Italy, or agreed with Prussia over the Duchies and the German problem, thereby gaining Prussian support against Italy. The honourable pride of Mensdorf and the military party in Austria refused to surrender anything till it was too late.
Mensdorf, the new Minister, proposed in a series of lengthy despatches his solution of the question; it was that the rights of the two Powers should be transferred to Augustenburg, and that Schleswig-Holstein should be established as an independent Confederate State.
In a country exposed during five or six centuries to incessant struggle against Asiatic craving for European allurements, or, to speak more definitely, after ninety-four Mongolian incursions, in which twenty millions of Polish people were carried off, and thousands of towns, bourgs, and villages were destroyed; after numberless wars, plunders, and devastations by Jazygs, Turks, Muscovites, Crusaders, Wallachians, Transylvanians, Swedes, Brandenburgians, etc., etc.; after a hundred years of the so-called paternal spoliation of Russia, Prussia, and Austria there could have been no opportunity, even under Graff Pouilly de Mensdorf, to build comfortable chateaux on the mouldering ruins, or for the accumulation of means for an easy life under the oppressions of an Austrian tariff, which exacted that goods manufactured in Lemberg should be sent for inspection to the Vienna custom house before being exposed to sale.
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