The parliamentary regime became one of the causes why the strength of the Habsburg State steadily declined during the last years of its existence. The more the predominance of the German element was whittled away through parliamentary procedure, the more prominent became the system of playing off one of the various constituent nationalities against the other. In the Imperial Parliament it was always the German element that suffered through the system, which meant that the results were detrimental to the Empire as a whole; for at the close of the century even the most simple-minded people could recognize that the cohesive forces within the Dual Monarchy no longer sufficed to counterbalance the separatist tendencies of the provincial nationalities. On the contrary!