ke a wedge between them. The difference can be most shortly
stated by saying that Austria did, in some blundering and barbaric way,
care for Europe; but Prussia cared for nothing but Prussia. Austria is
not a nation; you cannot really find Austria on the map. But Austria is
a kind of Empire; a Holy Roman Empire that never came, an expanding and
contracting-dream. It does feel itself, in a vague patriarchal way, the
leader, not of a nation, but of nations. It is like some dying Emperor
of Rome in the decline; who should admit that the legions had been
withdrawn from Britain or from Parthia, but would feel it as
fundamentally natural that they should have been there, as in Sicily or
Southern Gaul. I would not assert that the aged Francis Joseph imagines
that he is Emperor of Scotland or of Denmark; but I should guess that he
retains some notion that if he did rule both the Scots and the Danes, it
would not be more incongruous than his ruling both the Hungarians and
the Poles. This cosmopolitanism of Austria has in it a kind of shadow of
responsibility for Christendom. And it was this that made the difference
between its proceedings and those of the purely selfish adventurer from
the north, the wild dog of Pomerania.

It may be believed, as Fox himself came at last to believe, that
Napoleon in his latest years was really an enemy to freedom, in the
sense that he was an enemy to that very special and occidental form of
freedom which we call Nationalism. The resistance of the Spaniards, for
instance, was certainly a popular resistance. It had that peculiar,
belated, almost secretive strength with which war is made by the people.
It was quite easy for a conqueror to get into Spain; his great
difficulty was to get out again. It was one of the paradoxes of history
that he who had turned the mob into an army, in defence of its rights
against the princes, should at last have his army worn down, not by
princes but by mobs. It is equally certain that at the other end of
Europe, in burning Moscow and on the bridge of the Beresina, he had
found the common soul, even as he had found the common sky, his enemy.
But all this does not affect the first great lines of the quarrel, which
had begun before horsemen in Germanic uniform had waited vainly upon the
road to Varennes or had failed upon the miry slope up to the windmill of
Valmy. And that duel, on which depended all that our Europe has since
become, had great Russia and gallant Spain