Such reflections would be out of place at this point, but for the fact that Clemenceau has invariably contended that his career has been all of a piece, maintaining that the vigorous young physiologist and doctor of twenty-four and twenty-five held the same opinions and was moved by the same aspirations that have guided the mature man throughout. Whether heredity and surroundings fully account in every particular for all that he has said, done and achieved is a question which Clemenceau also might decline to answer with the definiteness he considers desirable in general philosophy. But that his doctor's thesis of 1865 did in the main give the scientific basis of his material creed can scarcely be disputed. The following year, 1866, was the year of the Prusso-Italian war against Austria. The success of Prussia, which would quite probably have been a failure but for the incredible fatuity of the Imperial clique at Vienna, was one of the chief causes, unnoted at the time, of the downfall of Napoleon III. Few now care to recall the manner in which the Austrian Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Benedek, was compelled to abandon his entire strategy in deference to the pusillanimous orders of the Emperor, or how Benedek, with a loyalty to the House of Hapsburg which it has never at any period deserved, took upon himself the blame of defeats for which Francis Joseph, not himself, was responsible. But Louis Napoleon was equally blind to his own interests and those of France when he stood aside and allowed the most ambitious and most unscrupulous power in the world to become the virtual master of Central Europe. It was a strange choice of evils that lay before the Radical and Republican parties in all countries during this war. None could wish to see upheld, still less strengthened, the wretched rule of reactionary, tyrannous and priest-ridden Austria; yet none could look favourably on the growth of Prussian power.