The solution! The Emperor Francis Joseph certainly had it in his hands, and it perhaps depended only on him to render it as decisive and as radical as the most mortal enemies of Russia could wish. Why not confess it? To see the bitter fruit _gathered_ by Austria in consequence of its honorable efforts during the Oriental crisis, and to see the implacable hatred and the cruel disasters which fell to its lot because of its attitude then, one surprises one's self sometimes in regretting that the cabinet of Vienna had so many scruples at this memorable epoch. One almost reproaches it for not having given proof of that independence of heart which seems, alas! the forced, indispensable condition for the independence of states. If Austria had wished to be a little less grateful and a little less politic during this war of the Orient, she would have resolutely joined herself to France and England, she would have taken part in the struggle, and instead of letting the allies rove for years around the borders of Russia, in the Black Sea and Baltic, she would have opened for them the fields of Poland, and have entered there with them. In place of "tickling the soul of the Colossus or of filing off a nail,"--as Russian publicists said later, and not without justice,--they should then have given him a _coup au coeur_,--one of those blows that the great recluse of Varzin knows how to plan and give. The cabinet of the Tuileries would not have refused to do this. In his dispatch of the 26th March, 1855, M. Drouyn de Lhuys laid down very skillfully the question of Poland; neither would the cabinet of St. James have raised serious objections. As to the probable success of such an enterprise, it suffices to remember that Russia was at the end of its resources, and that Prussia had not yet re-formed its military organization, was not yet in possession of its "instrument," and lastly that in place of William the Conqueror, Frederick the Romantic occupied the throne of the Hohenzollern. The mind is confounded before the contemplation of the consequences which such a decision on the part of the Emperor Francis Joseph might have caused. The face of the world would have been changed; Austria would certainly not have seen Sadowa[9] in 1866; Europe would not have seen the dismemberment of Denmark, nor the destruction of the _Bund_, nor the conquest of Alsace and Lorraine.