The causes were generally lost ones, and the ideas unpopular, but they were not always so retrograde as they seemed to those who held opposing views. The peculiar tragedy of the Habsburgs is that they were usually as far ahead of their age in some respects as they were behind it in others. They were historic failures, in the sense that they consistently missed achieving their major goals, but they count among the most imposing, or even glorious, failures in history.
