isplay of that prudence which is
said to be the chief virtue of an aristocracy, to secure all they
possessed,--which was all the country had to give,--and to prepare the
way for such gains as it might be found necessary to make, as the
American nation should increase in strength. But this prudence the
slaveholders would not display. They annoyed and insulted the people of
the Free States. They broke up the Democratic party, which was well
disposed to do their work. They pursued such a course as compelled the
great majority of the American people to take up arms against them, and
to abolish slavery by an act of war. The effect was the fall of a body
of men who certainly were very powerful, and who were believed to be
very wise in their generation. It was impossible to attack them as long
as they were true to their own interests, and they could fall only
through being attacked. They made war on the nation, and the nation was
forced to defend herself, and destroyed them. It is the most wonderful
case of suicide known to mankind.

The Austrian aristocracy behaved almost as unwisely as the American
aristocracy. As the Republic of the United States is a union of States,
which in reality was governed by the slaveholders down to 1861, so is
the Austrian Empire a collection of countries, governed by a few great
families, at the head of which stand the imperial family,--the House of
Austria, or, as it is now generally called, the House of
Hapsburg-Lorraine. That aristocracy might have prevented the occurrence
of war last summer, by ceding Venetia to Italy; and that it did not make
such cession early in June, when we know it was ready to make it early
in July, but plunged into a contest which, according to the apologists
for its terrible defeat, it was wholly unprepared to wage, speaks but
poorly for its prudence, though that is claimed to be _the_ virtue of
aristocracies. The Austrian aristocrats behaved as senselessly in 1866
as the Prussian aristocrats in 1806, but with less excuse than the
latter had. By their action they caused their country's degradation.
From the rank of a first-rate power that country has been compelled to
descend, not so much through loss of territory and population as through
loss of position. For centuries the house of Austria has been very
powerful in Europe, though the Austrian empire can count but sixty
years. Rudolph of Hapsburg, the first member of his line who rose to
great eminence, in the latter