A belief in good luck sometimes helps men to the enjoyment of good
luck,--and if men, why not nations?
Yet against this reliance on her luck by Austria must be placed the
wonderful changes that have come over the world since those times when
it was in the power of a government like the Austrian to exert a great
influence on the course of events. Down to the time of the French
Revolution, Austrian contests were carried on against nations,
governments, and dynasties, and not against peoples. Even the wars that
grew out of the Reformation were in no strict sense of a popular
character, but were waged by the great of the earth, who found their
account in being champions of progressive ideas,--the liberalism of
those days. Almost all the renowned anti-Austrian leaders of the Thirty
Years' War were kings, nobles, aristocrats of every grade, most of whom,
we may suppose, cared as little for political freedom as the Hapsburgs
cared for it. Gustavus Adolphus could be as arbitrary as Ferdinand II.,
and some of his most ardent admirers are of opinion that he fell none
too soon for his own reputation, though much too soon for the good of
Europe, when he was slain on the glorious field of Luetzen. The most
remarkable of all the wars waged by the Austrian house against human
rights was that which Philip II.
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