Austria, unable alone to cope with Hungary, committed the immeasurable blunder of calling in the 200,000 Russians who made conquest certain, but the price of whose aid she may still have to pay. Venice, and Venice only, continued to defy her power. Since Novara, the first result of which was the withdrawal of the Sardinian Commissioners, who had taken over the government after the Fusion, Venice had been ruled by Manin on the terms which he himself proposed: 'Are you ready,' he asked the Venetian Assembly, 'to invest the Government with unlimited powers in order to direct the defence and maintain order?' He warned them that he should be obliged to impose upon them enormous sacrifices, but they replied by voting the order of the day: 'Venice resists the Austrians at all costs; to this end the President Manin is invested with plenary powers.' All the deputies then raised their right hand, and swore to defend the city to the last extremity. They kept their word. It is hard to say which was the most admirable: Manin's fidelity to his trust, or the people's fidelity to him. To keep up the spirits, to maintain the decorum of a besieged city even for a few weeks or a few months, is a task not without difficulty; but when the months run into a second year, when the real pinch of privations has been felt by everyone, not as a sudden twinge, but as a long-drawn-out pain, when the bare necessities of life fail, and a horrible disease, cholera, enters as auxiliary under the enemy's black-and-yellow, death-and-pestilence flag; then, indeed, the task becomes one which only a born leader of men could perform. The financial administration of the republic was a model of order and economy. Generous voluntary assistance was afforded by all classes, from the wealthy patrician and the Jewish merchant to the poorest gondolier. Mazzini once said bitterly that it was easier to get his countrymen to give their blood than their money; here they gave both. The capable manner in which Manin conducted the foreign policy of the republic is also a point that deserves mention, as it won the esteem even of statesmen of the old school, though it was powerless to obtain their help. The time was gone when France was disposed to do anything for Venice; no one except the Archbishop of Paris, who was afterwards to die by the hand of an assassin, said a word for her.