Page:Diplomacy and the War (Andrassy 1921).djvu/213

 Andrassy, Eötvös, made the ruler a part of the nation, the very ruler in whose name Haynau and Bach created the revolution. The King spent much of his time in Hungarian society, and the Queen, who had learnt to love the Hungarian nation, and who was worshipped by them, negotiated, thanks to her genius, between her husband and the Hungarian nation. Rudolf, his successor, also had Hungarian sympathies. Confidence and hope combined in mutually interdependent factors: the nation and the king. The nation gradually accustomed herself to regarding the narrow family circle of the king as Hungary, but unfortunately the dynasty remained a stranger because its members were unknown.

This promising epoch was of short duration. The king regarded the adjustment of 1867 as a contract between the nation and himself, a contract which was based upon the assumption that the nation should not interfere with the unity of the army, that the leadership in military questions was left entirely to him, in exchange for which the king undertook to respect the re-instituted constitution. When the demand became increasingly urgent in Hungary that the Hungarian portion of the army should be reorganized upon a national basis, when the opposition attempted to influence the rights of the king in military matters by parliamentary means, when that party gained in strength which aimed at a complete change of the 1867 adjustment, the king was disappointed and even hurt. He was afraid that the national motive might have a