It never occurred to him that in the ancient supranational tradition of his family he possessed, albeit in raw and imperfect form, an ultramodern antidote to the toxins of modern nationalism. He put his faith in the tried and tested — and unfailingly calamitous — nostrums of cautious expediency; a dram of repressive firmness, an ounce of gracious concession, a pinch of genteel trickery. It was in this spirit that the aged autocrat, confronted as we have seen earlier with the threat of Magyar separatism and harassed by left-wing agitation for electoral reform, hit on the idea of playing
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