that the
fault of the government lay in the fact that it did not govern, and he
deplored that his own function, in a decadent age, was but "to prop up
mouldering institutions." He was not constitutionally averse from change;
and he was too clear-sighted not to see that, sooner or later, change was
inevitable. But his interest was in the fascinating game of diplomacy; he
was ambitious of playing the leading part on the great stage of
international politics; and he was too consummate a courtier to risk the
loss of the imperial favour by any insistence on unpalatable reforms,
which, after all, would perhaps only reveal the necessity for the complete
revolution which he feared.

The alternative was to use the whole force of the government to keep things
as they were. The disintegrating force of the ever-simmering racial
rivalries could be kept in check by the army; Hungarian regiments
garrisoned Italy, Italian regiments guarded Galicia, Poles occupied
Austria, and Austrians Hungary. The peril from the infiltration of
"revolutionary" ideas from without was met by the erection round the
Austrian dominions of a Chinese wall of tariffs and censors, which had,
however, no more success than is usual with such expedients.[3] The peril
from the independent growth of Liberalism within was guarded against by a
rigid supervision of the press and the re-establishment of clerical control
over education. Music alone flourished, free from government interference;
but, curiously enough, the movements, in Bohemia, Croatia and elsewhere,
for the revival of the national literatures and languages--which were to
issue in the most difficult problem facing the Austrian government at the
opening of the 20th century--were encouraged in exalted circles, as tending
to divert attention from political to purely scientific interests.
Meanwhile the old system of provincial diets and estates was continued or
revived (in 1816 in Tirol and Vorarlberg, 1817 in Galicia, 1818 in
Carniola, 1828 in the circle of Salzburg), but they were in no sense
representative, clergy and nobles alone being eligible, with a few
delegates from the towns, and they had practically no functions beyond
registering the imperial decrees, relative to recruiting or taxation, and
dealing with matters of local police.[4] Even the ancient right of petition
was seldom exercised, and then only to meet with the imperial disfavour.
And this stagnation of the administration was accompanied, a