The one thing that saved the system from total shipwreck was the antagonisms that existed, not only between the Germans and the majority opposed to them, but also between the various races of which that majority was composed. These antagonisms were sedulously fomented by the government itself. It is one of the worst sins of the Hapsburgs that, far from acting as peacemakers or even as impartial arbiters between their discordant races, they deliberately and systematically strove to aggravate national animosities and to fan the flames of discord, hoping to be able to play off one race against another in the authentic Turkish fashion, and seeming to imagine that Austria could subsist through internal dissensions, just as Poland was once thought to subsist through her anarchy. The Emperor Francis I congratulated himself that his peoples were aliens to each other and detested one another: each race could therefore be used as a jailer for some other race. “From their antipathies springs order,” he declared, “and from their mutual hatred the general peace.”[52] Francis Joseph might adopt as an official slogan _Viribus unitis_, but his practice was based much more upon the traditional maxim, _Divide et impera_. He and his agents are very largely responsible for that violent series of nationality conflicts which have raged in almost every province of the monarchy--that _bellum omnium contra omnes_, which has disgraced and poisoned the political life of Austria and paved the way for her complete disruption.