s frightful pressure on her motley lands endowed them with a
solidity which they had never known before; and in less than four
years, the conqueror had cause to regret having driven the Hapsburgs
to desperation. It may even be questioned whether Austerlitz itself
was not a misfortune to him. Just before that battle he thought of
treating Austria leniently, taking only Verona and Legnago, and
exchanging Venetia against Salzburg. This would have detached her from
the Coalition, and made a friend of a Power that is naturally inclined
to be conservative.

After Austerlitz, he rushed to the other extreme and forced the
Hapsburgs to a hostility in which the Marie Louise marriage was only a
forced and uneasy truce. His motives are not, in my judgment, to be
assigned to mere lust of domination, but rather to a reasoned though
exaggerated conviction of the need of Prussia and Russia to his
Continental System. Above all things, he now sought to humble England,
so that finally he might be free for his long-deferred Oriental
enterprise. This is the irony of his career, that, though he preferred
the career of Alexander the Great to that of Caesar; though he placed
his victory at Austerlitz far below the triumph of the great
Macedonian at Issus which assured the conquest of the Orient, yet he
felt himself driven to the very measures which tethered him to _cette
vieille Europe_ and which finally roused the Continent against him.

Among his errors of judgment, assuredly his behaviour to Austria in
1805 was not the least. The recent history of Europe supplies a
suggestive contrast. Two generations after Austerlitz, the Hapsburg
Power was shattered by the disaster of Koeniggraetz, and once more lost
all influence in Germany and Italy. But the victor then showed
consideration for the vanquished. Bismarck had pondered over the
lessons of history, because, as he said, _history teaches one how far
one may safely go_. He therefore persuaded King William to forego
claims that would have embittered the rivalry of Prussia and Austria.
Nay! he recurred to Talleyrand's policy of encouraging the Hapsburgs
to seek in the Balkan Peninsula compensation for their losses in the
west: and within fifteen years the basis of the Triple Alliance was
firmly laid. Napoleon, on the other hand, for lack of that
statesmanlike moderation which consecrates victory and cements the
fabric of an enduring Empire, soon saw the political results of
Austerlitz swept awa