Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 8.djvu/387

 THE COURSE RIGHTLY TAKEN BY AUSTRIA. 355 forego the powerful aid she had proffered. They chap. at once set her free to abandon that attitude of ' menace — armed menace — by which — without ^iuatriiw going to war — she long had been pressing on propo f als - Eussia. It then became plain to Austria that fr t ee t0 .. L change her the Western Powers were going beyond what course - she had pronounced to be the just exigencies of the Four Points, and (by virtue of that dis- cretion which they had taken good care to reserve) were continuing their war with a mind to either capture Sebastopol or else wring from the Czar such a cession of what his men called ' sovereign ' rights,' as might serve like a ' conquest ' to show instead of the untaken fortress. Austria judged The course that under these conditions 'the responsibility,' took" 8 as she called it, of going on with the war no longer attached on the Eussians. She did not deny — no one did — that upon this matter, the question which asked how the Western Powers should deal with the obstinate fact that they still were defied by Sebastopol, France and England must judge for themselves of the course which their self-respect dictated, and go on with the strife, if convinced that this was what Honour required; but Count Buol rightly judged that to aid them in the pursuit of an object so pecul- iarly their own, he ought not to involve his own country and bring it into a war — a war that must needs have been formidable even when she began to arm in the previous year, but had since been rendered trebly embarrassing by the defection of Prussia, by the ceasing of those Russian en-