The parliamentary regime in the later years con¬ tinuously contributed towards progressive weakening of the old Habsburg State. As the predominance of the German element was broken up by its agency, a system grew up of playing off the nationalities one against the other. But the general line of development was directed against the Germans. In particular, from the time when his heirship to the Throne began to give the Archduke Francis Ferdinand a certain influence, a deliberate scheme arose for increasing Czech influence, which was the policy of those at the top. The future ruler of the Dual Monarchy tried by every means in his power to give impetus to the de-Germanizing process and to assist it himself, or at least favour it with his protection. Thus purely German villages were, by roundabout official means, slowly but surely thrust into the danger-zone of mixed languages. In Lower Austria itself the process was making more and more rapid progress, and many of the Czechs considered Vienna as their chief city.
The preponderant thought of this new Habsburger, whose family spoke Czech for choice (the Archduke’s wife had been a Czech countess and had married the Prince morganatically, and the circles in which she was born were anti-German by tradition), was gradually to establish a Slav State in Central Europe, on strictly Catholic lines, to be a protection against Orthodox Russia. In this way, as so frequently happened with the Habsburgers, religion was once again dragged in to serve a purely political conception—moreover, a bane¬ ful one, when looked at from the German point of view.
The result was more than tragic in several respects. Neither the House of Habsburg nor the Catholic Church profited by it as they had hoped.