But Austria has seldom risen to her opportunities. According to Napoleon’s well known saying, she was always just behindhand with an army or an idea. There was always something strangely inefficient, ill-adjusted, factitious, unhealthy, or fundamentally dishonest about her. As has often been remarked, Austria was not a nation, it was only a government--a dynasty, an aristocracy, a bureaucracy, and an army. A dynasty, which had an extraordinary passion and talent for acquiring land--“the most successful race of matrimonial and land speculators known to history,” someone has called them[50]--but which has shown very little constructive or executive ability in the tasks of internal government, and whose policy has been defined as simply one of “exalted opportunism in the pursuit of the unchanging dynastic idea”;[51] a kind of permanent camarilla about the throne, made up of sixty or seventy archdukes and archduchesses and a group of great aristocratic houses, so influential and exclusive that Mickiewicz described Austria as “an East India Company exploited by two hundred families”; a bureaucracy, dull, pedantic, arbitrary, and inefficient, whose ideal of government seldom rose above the typical Austrian motto “fortwursteln”--muddle along someway--; an army whose degree of internal cohesion is shown by the fact that its recruits swore allegiance to the emperor in nine languages, and which had an unequalled record for the number of its defeats; such were the chief forces that held this “ramshackle empire” together. The task of maintaining and consolidating so motley a realm was, after the rise of the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century, increasingly and desperately difficult; but perhaps it would not have been an impossible undertaking, if the dynasty had only honestly carried out the principle of the equality of all the Austrian races, and if it had gone over, while still there was time, to a genuine federal state organization. But the Hapsburgs did neither. Instead they repudiated both ideas by adopting and for fifty years maintaining the Dualist system of 1867, which meant the division of the monarchy into two halves, each of which was to be ruled by a minority--the Germans in the one case, the Magyars in the other--at the expense, and in defiance of the wishes, of the Slavic and Latin majorities. That system has been called “the ruin of modern Austria.” Of the workings of the system in Hungary something will be said in the next chapter. In the Austrian or Cisleithan part of the monarchy, Dualism led to incessant struggles, immense embitterment, and finally the virtual breakdown of constitutional government, and a return to a but slightly disguised absolutism.