the last champion of the Enlightenment,
and "fought his battles in the name of the
very Enlightenment that had produced his
opponents and his was therefore a mortal
challenge."

The man who gave his name to his age
has, from the start, been a controversial
figure. No one has seriously questioned his
exceptional talents in the technique of di-
plomacy; it is the content of that diplomacy
and the objectives toward which that talent
was directed that have been variously in-
terpreted, the interpretations determined
largely by the philosophic and political
predilections of the particular writer. In
his Staatsmänner und Geschichtsschreiber,
published in 1896, Ottokar Lorenz points
out that historians seem to have difficulties
when dealing with this statesman "who
was hated, honored and feared during the
first half of the century, but then became
merely the scapegoat for all the ills existing
in Europe, and was made into a sort of his-
torical spectre with which to frighten those
political children who believed that, as a
result of constitutional and parliamentary
arrangements, Europe at the end of the
nineteenth century would swim in a sea of
happiness and universal satisfaction."

Perhaps the events of the twentieth cen-
tury, producing revolutionary changes not
without their analogies to those of the era
of Metternich, have made it possible to
judge the problems, the aims and the effi-
cacy of the driving of the "Coachman of
Europe" more justly.

[NOTE: The statements in the Conflict of Opinion
on page xiii are the following sources: Heinrich von Treitschke
, History of Germany in the
Nineteenth Century, II, p,. 13 ; Algernon Cecil,
Metternich, pp. 326-327; Hugo Hantsch, Die
Geschiechte Oesterreichs, II, p. 307.]

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