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It is like some dying Emperor of Rome in the decline; who should admit that the legions had been withdrawn from Britain or from Parthia, but would feel it as fundamentally natural that they should have been there, as in Sicily or Southern Gaul.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.