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nineteenth century progressed the anachronistic Empire increasingly looked for determinacy of calculation and this can be found more easily in the application of bureaucratic norms than in the adjustment to changing conditions. Administration creates the illusion of "running by itself"; the routine which is its mode of assimilating mediocrity appears to the outsider as the condition of its success. The motivation of a bureaucracy is its quest for safety; it measures success by errors avoided rather than by goals achieved; it prides itself on objectivity which is a denial of the necessity of great conception — all qualities which to a disintegrating structure may symbolize a means to rescue certainty from impending chaos. It is understandable, even if it proved disastrous, that Austria increasingly applied purely administrative considerations to the solution of its complex domestic problems. But while it was true that Austria could not make the transition from a dynastic to a centralized state without disintegrating, it did not follow that it had to import the mode of government of the eighteenth and earlier centuries into the modern period. It was the measure of the sterility of Austrian statesmanship that it confused the nature of its domestic legitimization with the structure of its bureaucracy and that an outmoded administration therefore confronted the rapidly multiplying problems of industrialization, nationalism and liberalism. In this manner, the Austrian monarchy lost the opportunity to justify itself through performance and the opposition was enabled to add to the doctrinal differences the charge of inefficiency.

The system of administration was nothing less than a continuation of the patriarchal pattern of obligations of the feudal period. The Emperor

was not only the sole source of authority juridically but the actual
center of both policy and administration. The government was conducted
not by means of ministries, but through departments of the Imperial Court.
Their heads were not ministers but "Hofrate," permanent chiefs of depart-
ments. For almost a decade, Metternich was the only official with the
title of minister and he paid for his eminence by being jealously deprived
of all domestic influence. Beside the Emperor, no less than three organs
were charged with coordinating the different departments; but they were
in the nature of inter-departmental committees, composed of officials of
the departments concerned, and their structure and function were so
indeterminate than an eminent Austrian historian in 1884 was unable to
account for them precisely. 36 At any rate, they met but at the pleasure
of the Emperor and considered only the matters he chose to bring before them.
The Austrian administration has been described as a contraption whose
wheels revolved with an infernal noise without advancing one inch. Well
might Metternich say in later life that he had sometimes governed Europe,
but never Austria.

This did not mean that Metternich approved of the Austrian mode of
government, however. On the contrary, one of his first acts on assuming
the foreign ministry was to propose its reorganization and soon after he
submitted a plan to introduce a Reichsrat, an imperial council, to coordinate
and develop basic policy. 37 But these efforts, as so many others, ran afoul
of the obstinacy of the Emperor. Emperor Franz was one of the mediocrities
who believe that the lesson of experience resides in mechanical remembrance.
His notion of success was the opposite of failure, his notion of causality

36. Springer I, p. 120.

37. N.P. II, p. 315, p. 444f.