the King to close with the offer of the French Emperor. [109] But the King shrank from a decision which involved the possibility of immediate war. The offer of Hanover was rejected, and Prussia connected itself neither with Napoleon nor his enemies. [State of Austria. The army.] Pitt, the author of the Coalition of 1805, had formed the most sanguine estimate of the armaments of his allies. Austria was said to have entered upon a new era since the peace of Lunéville, and to have turned to the best account all the disasters of its former campaigns. There had indeed been no want of fine professions from Vienna, but Pitt knew little of the real state of affairs. The Archduke Charles had been placed at the head of the military administration, and entrusted with extraordinary powers; but the whole force of routine and corruption was ranged against him. He was deceived by his subordinates; and after three years of reorganisation he resigned his post, confessing that he left the army no nearer efficiency than it was before. Charles was replaced at the War Office by General Mack. Within six months this bustling charlatan imagined himself to have effected the reorganisation of which the Archduke despaired, [110] while he had in fact only introduced new confusion into an army already hampered beyond any in Europe by its variety of races and languages. [Political condition of Austria.] If the military reforms of Austria were delusive, its political reforms were still more so. The Emperor had indeed consented to unite the Ministers, who had hitherto worked independently, in a Council of State; but here reform stopped. Cobenzl, who was now First Minister, understood nothing but diplomacy. Men continued in office whose presence was an insuperable bar to any intelligent action: even in that mechanical routine which, in the eyes of the Emperor Francis, constituted the life of the State, everything was antiquated and self-contradictory. In all that affected the mental life of the people the years that followed the peace of Lunéville were distinctly retrograde. Education was placed more than ever in the hands of the priests; the censorship of the press was given to the police; a commission was charged with the examination of all the books printed during the reign of the Emperor Joseph, and above two thousand works, which had come into being during that brief period of Austrian liberalism, were suppressed and destroyed. Trade regulations were issued which combined the extravagance of the French Reign of Terror with the ignorance of the Middle Ages. All the grain in the country was ordered to be sold before a certain date, and the Jews were prohibited from carrying on the corn-trade for a year. Such were the reforms described by Pitt in the English Parliament as having effected the regeneration of Austria. Nearer home things were judged in a truer light. Mack's paper-regiments, the helplessness and unreality of the whole system of Austrian officialism,