[Footnote 3: The Darmstadt government declared to the second chamber, on its bringing forward a motion for the intercession of Darmstadt with the federal assembly in favor of the legality of the ancient constitution then in force in Hanover, that the grandduke would never tolerate any cooperation on the part of the Estates with his vote in the federal assembly.] [Footnote 4: "This defeat is, however, not to be lamented: the battle for the separate constitutions has not been fought in vain if German nationality spring from the wreck of German separatism, if we are taught that without a liberal federal constitution liberal provincial constitutions are impossible in Germany."--_Pfizer._] CCLXXI. Austria and Prince Mettenich Austria might, on the fall of Napoleon, have maintained Alsace, Lorraine, the Breisgau, and the whole of the territory of the Upper Rhine in the same manner in which Prussia had maintained that of the Lower Rhine, had she not preferred the preservation of her rule in Italy and rendered her position in Germany subordinate to her station as a European power. This policy is explained by the peculiar circumstances of the Austrian state, which had for centuries comprised within itself nations of the most distinct character, and the population of whose provinces were by far the greater part Slavonian, Hungarian, and Italian, the great minority German. By this policy she lost, as the Prussian Customs' Union has also again proved, much of her influence over Germany, while, on the other hand, she secured it the more firmly in Southern and Eastern Europe. Austria has long made a gradual and almost unperceived advance from the northwest in a southeasterly direction. In Germany she has continually lost ground. Switzerland, the Netherlands, Alsace, Lorraine, the Swabian counties, Lusatia, Silesia, have one by one been severed from her, while her non-German possessions have as continually been increased, by the addition of Hungary, Transylvania, Galicia, Dalmatia, and Upper Italy. The contest carried on between Austria, the French Revolution, and Napoleon, has at all events left deep and still visible traces; the characters of the emperor Francis and of his chancellor of state, Prince Metternich, that perfect representative of the aristocracy of Europe, sympathize also as closely with the Austrian system as the character of the emperor Joseph was antipathetical to it. This system dates, however, earlier than those revolutionary struggles, and has already outlived at least one of its supporters.