The dissembling ministers of Germany and Austria, in essaying public debates with President Wilson, tried to build a fabric of peace on a foundation of sand. In their utterances they "played up" to one another. Their outgivings suggested a vaudeville act in which one player provides cues for the witticisms of the other. Thus, Count Czernin, dense to the Allied scorn of the deceits of his partner, Count von Hertling, announced that Austria, too, agreed that President Wilson's four points provided a suitable basis on which to begin negotiating a general peace. More than that, he complacently viewed President Wilson's address as actually offering an olive branch to Austria: "He (President Wilson)," he told the Vienna City Council, "thinks, however, that Vienna presents more favorable soil for sowing the seeds of a general peace. He has perhaps said to himself that the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy has the good fortune to have a monarch who genuinely and honorably desires a general peace, but that this monarch will never be guilty of a breach of faith; that he will never make a shameful peace, and that behind this monarch stand 55,000,000 souls. "I imagine that Mr. Wilson says to himself that this closely knit mass of people represents a force which is not to be disregarded and that this honorable and firm will to peace with which the monarch is imbued and which binds him to the peoples of both states is capable of carrying a great idea in the service of which Mr. Wilson has also placed himself." No one believed, outside the countries of the Central Powers, that Austria-Hungary was blessed with a monarch who would "never be guilty of a breach of faith," who would "never make a shameful peace," and who ruled over a "closely knit mass of people." In the same breath he said: "Whatever may happen, we shall not sacrifice German interests any more than Germany will desert us. Loyalty on the Danube is not less than German loyalty." Here was the real Austria speaking, and her spirit was made more manifest when Count Czernin proceeded to defend the political crime of thrusting peace upon Russia by invasion: "The first breach in the determination of our enemies to war has been driven by the peace negotiations with Russia. That was a break-through by the idea of peace. "It is a symptom of childish dilettantism to overlook the close relationship of the various peace signatures with each other. The constellation of enemy powers in the east was like a net. When one mesh was cut through the remaining meshes loosened of their own accord."