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12 beginning of the seventeenth century. The main political problem for Europe in the century then opening was how to consolidate and perpetuate that principle by settled institutions under which all Germany might dwell and flourish. Yet this was the moment of all others chosen by the Emperor Ferdinand to attempt to render Catholicism dominant by force of arms. It was far too late, and the result was the Thirty Years' War, from which civil strife Germany scarcely recovered for two centuries.

Again, the external function of the House of Hapsburg was an effective resistance to France, to be maintained on behalf of Germany. This was what Germany asked of Austria as the price of primacy among the multifarious Teutonic states, and this is what, on the most critical of all occasions, the Hapsburgs failed to offer. For when, in 1809, the rising of the nations against Napoleon had just commenced, and the spirit of nationality began to move more strongly on the face of the waters, it was then that Austria, after a struggle by no means inglorious, inaugurated a policy of steady acquiescence in the supremacy of France, and pursued in regard to domestic government those reactionary tendencies which were to prove so disastrous during the nineteenth century. Again, as Bismarck put it, "A history of the House of Hapsburg from Charles V. onwards is a whole series of neglected opportunities."

Thus the House of Hapsburg has been rudely