The rule, theoretically absolute, is modifiable by the Emperor’s caprice. Francis Joseph is the Head of the House as well as the Sovereign Ruler of the Empire; his judgment seat is, in all family matters, the ultimate tribunal. He can grant dispensations, like the Pope; and he sits without assessors—to decide whether hallowed principles or personal inclinations constitute the Higher Law. There are times when he feels that he would like to yield but must not; times when he yields, against his will, to a pressure which wears down his resistance; times when, though there is no particular reason why he should not yield, he simply does not choose to. One can easily adduce both earlier and later examples of each of the three attitudes; but one can trace through them all a gradual weakening, due, in part, no doubt, to advancing age, but in part also to a dawning perception of the deleterious effect of the Habsburg system upon human happiness. Marriage after marriage, arranged in accordance with the prescriptions of the system, has resulted in misery—sometimes to the point of making the welkin ring with scandal. The failure of Rudolph’s marriage was notorious; the failure of Otto’s marriage was hardly repaired by his wife’s dutiful attention to him when he came back to her, a mental and moral, as well as a physical, wreck. There were rumours that the Archduchess Augustine—Francis Joseph’s granddaughter, the daughter of the Archduchess Gisela—suffered violence at her husband’s hands; and the union of the Archduchess Maria Dorothea to the Duc d’Orléans was equally unsatisfactory. That son of St. Louis had in his youth been tracked to a hotel in Paris by the outraged husband of a Queen of Song, attended by a French commissary of police; and he and the Duchesse d’Orléans have sometimes lived separately and talked about divorce. Yet another Archduchess—the consort of Leopold II., King of the Belgians—had reason to complain that she was forsaken for the French dancer, Cléo de Mérode, and many other ladies mostly of low degree and light repute. Assuredly there is food for reflection on the Habsburg system in this array of connubial facts; and one cannot doubt that it has produced a cumulative effect upon Francis Joseph’s mind and conscience. None the less, it has found other preconceptions and prejudices firmly entrenched in that mind and conscience; and the campaign between the two sets of ideas and points of view has been long and violent—the victory inclining sometimes to the one side and sometimes to the other. Quite recently, for instance—at a date subsequent to several remarkable concessions of which we shall be speaking in a moment—Europe heard of the morganatic principle being discountenanced with such severe success that seven Habsburgs (though they were no longer entitled to call themselves Habsburgs) came, as we say in England, “on the rates.” This is how a Viennese correspondent chronicles the incident: