Still, something had to be done; some organisation had to be contrived to give cohesion to the medley and provide the Continental Concert with a reasonable prospect of a quiet life. So there sprang into being two organisations which concern us:— 1. The German Federation. 2. The Holy Alliance. Their detailed history need not delay us; but we must pause to see how they created the difficulties with which Francis Joseph, coming to throne as a boy of eighteen, had to cope, and posed the problems which he would have either to solve for himself or to see roughly, and even violently, solved for him by others. Just as the Holy Roman Empire was scarcely worthy to be called an Empire, so the German Federation was scarcely worthy to be called a Federation. It was loose and cumbrous, inefficient and inert. There was no Federal Tribunal, no Federal army, no Federal diplomatic machinery; in all these matters the component States—ruled by thirty-eight separate sovereigns—retained their independence. The Federal Assembly, which met at Frankfurt, was, in effect, only a Congress of the Ambassadors of those States, with the Austrian Ambassador in the chair. No important step could be taken without the unanimous consent of the Ambassadors; and there was no important piece of business on which they were all of one mind. The position of Austria at the head of the Assembly was one of dignity without authority, conferring little more actual power than falls to the president of a debating society. So loose an arrangement obviously could not endure. One of two things was bound to happen; the bonds of union must, in the course of time, either be tightened or be broken. The seeds of destruction were present in the organisation from the first in the shape of Austro-Prussian jealousy: that jealousy between the Past and the Future to which we have referred. The interests and aspirations of these two dominant States conflicted. Neither of them was strong enough to bring the other to heel; neither of them was weak enough, or humble enough, to acquiesce in the other’s hegemony. It remained only for one of them to turn the other out of the Federation, and fashion a real Federation—a real Empire, perhaps—out of the remaining constituents. That inevitable process—delayed for more than fifty years, but eventually altering the whole outlook of Austrian policy—was to provide the central problem of Francis Joseph’s reign; but many other problems, hardly of less significance, were first to arise out of the programme of the Holy Alliance.