THE AUSTRIAN PREMIER.
IT is very much easier to admire the policy of Count Beust than it is to admire him. Indeed, any careful study of his personal characteristics is apt to produce a secret doubt whether his policy can be so wise or so successful as it some- times appears to be. One does not expect wine out of a water-bottle. According to his admirers, the Chancellor of the Austrian Empire has, by a new and daring policy, reinvigorated the monarchy until it is once again to be reckoned among the five Great Powers. Hungary has been reconciled, Austria pacified, the army remodelled, credit re-established, alliances cemented. There is a grand Empire once more, and it is all Beust, who, in the midst of these labours, finds time to be exceedingly interested in a series of petty diplomatic squabbles, which, were they not so dangerous, would be contemptible. We confess that, reading the accounts of those squabbles, we are driven to question the faith of those who believe in the clever Chancellor, to doubt whether he is so much a statesman as a diplomatist, to listen more attentively to the enemies who maintain that his success is due partly to accident, partly to pliability, and mainly to the fact that when he was called to the helm the times required a shrewd diplomatist to mediate between the House of Haps- burg and its exasperated subjects. That function he was able to fulfil to perfection, and he did fulfil it. He had the wit to perceive that the mastery of the situation rested with Francis Deak, and that Deak preferred an alliance between Hungary and the Hapsburgs to an alliance between Hungary and any more powerful stranger, whether Romanoff or Hohenzollern, and he accordingly gave him his own terms. Those terms, as It proved, were most advantageous to the Empire and the family at its head, but they were the terms imposed by the great Hungarian Whig, not the terms suggested by the Saxon Premier of Austria. Deak, not Beust, prepared the modus vivendi for the two halves of the Empire, persuaded the Hun- garians to accept it, and smoothed away the susceptibilities which at every moment threatened to make any treaty of any kind impossible. All the Count did was to accept,—not a func- tion which requires a genius of the most exalted order. Turn- ing to the German subjects of the Kaiser, he saw that, de- prived as they were of their old supremacy over their fellow- subjects, they would not put up either with the old refusal of liberty, or with the system of ecclesiastical tyranny conse- crated by the Concordat. Seeing that, and knowing that resistance was hopeless, Count Beust, in his capacity of Am- bassador from the Kaiser to his people, offered fair terms. The Concordat should be disregarded,—not abolished, mind ; it is not abolished, or likely to be, the Chancellor having failed to secure the smallest concession from Rome, where he does not possess, indeed, one-third of the influence exercised by Count von Bismarck, Minister of an avowedly heretical state. To abolish that agreement required a statesman ; to disregard it it was only necessary to be a Protestant, and the Chancellor was born that. As to liberty, there must be a compromise. The Army must be left alone, and foreign policy ; but the people should be entrusted with a decided control over active legislation, particularly in social matters like education and marriage, and all arrangements connected with ecclesiastical organization. The people, easy-going, disinclined to affairs, and still full of a notion that their business was when practi- cable to obey the House of Hapsburg, yielded ; there was a reconciliation between the electors and the Monarchy ; a clever financier devised the most astute and impudent stroke of busi- ness done in our time, a partial repudiation of the Debt, which actually raised Austrian credit, at the cost of shaking that of half Europe and America, where the fatal precedent may find willing imitators, and lo ! the monarchy was again in smooth water, and the Emperor as much master as the American President would be if he were irremovable. Bat, say the hostile critics, in all this Count Benet was but diplo- matist, not statesman, far less administrator. He has not
really founded anything or improved anything. Hungary is no longer jealous of Austria, but Austria is jealous of Hun- gary. Discontent in Bohemia has increased to such an extent
that Bohemians for two years seriously contemplated a Russian alliance ; and though they have abandoned that impracticable scheme, are seriously bent on contending for an autonomy rendered impossible by their geographical
position ; and this, although throughout the great struggle Bohemia was loyal. Austria itself, so far from being con- tented, is fretting and fuming under an idea, partly correct, that highly civilized Germans have been subordinated to semi-
civilized though the Hungarian Diet is
civilized, its electorate is not,—while as to the Army, it is neither the old military brotherhood which, always beaten, always died fighting,—no army perhaps ever lost so many men on the field as the Austrian,—nor is it the slow-moving but absolutely trustworthy Prussian landwehr. So depressed is the state of feeling, that the Chancellor himself recom- mended an increase of pay to officers to revive patriotic ardour, —they had barely bread—and would recommend it for the men, if the Treasury were in a state to bear the extra drain.
If the truth were known, it is said, and said on good authority, the Empire is as little prepared for a great campaign, for the sort of rough, heavy, dangerous work which would be involved
in a war with North Germany, as it was before Sadowa, is just as soft and cumbrous a body, unable ever to exert its full strength in time. It has no Venetia, it is true, and its German troops will therefore be available ; but then it has, on the other side, lost its old autocratic unity.
To decide in such a dispute needs more of local knowledge and more of the spirit of prophecy than we may venture to claim ; but if Count Beust were anxious to destroy his European reputation, he would do exactly what he appears to be doing, that is, manage the foreign affairs of the Empire,
in which he is virtually uncontrolled except by his master, in
the spirit of a third-rate diplomatist irritated by a failure. That the true policy for Austria for the next ten years would be a kind of Chinese isolation from all external politics whatever is a fixed English idea, but we have no intention of pressing that. A fixed English idea about foreign politics is, nine times out of ten, an idea adopted in the teeth of all facts because it suits English interests ; and we are quite con- tent to reason in this case upon the Austrian basis, namely, that the policy to be pursued is that which the House of Haps- burg thinks it its interest to pursue. That House is either not desirous of regaining its influence in Germany, and with it much of its greatness in its own eyes ; or, as is much more probable, it is desirous. If it is not, what can its Chancellor gain by perpetual threats about his excellent understanding with France, and querulous femininities about the unkindness of Berlin ? Let France be friendly, or Berlin unkind, and what then, if Austria is seeking nothing from either of them, if she does not desire the end which, and which alone, would be advanced or retarded by the friendship of Napoleon or the hostility of Frederick William V Or if, on the other hand, the Kaiser would gladly regain his chance of the German hegemony, what can be more silly than premature avowals of friendship for the foreigner, feeble expressions of undying hostility to the Government which, justly or unjustly, does just now represent Germany, and still feebler attempts to defend Saxon autonomy, which if successfully defended would make no more differ- ence now than it did in 1866 I' With every wish to be just, we cannot even conceive a motive for Count Beust's last exhibition of querulousness, except a desire to assert that, in spite of facts and treaties and its present Premier, his own beloved petty state is and shall be independent. Never mind about Sadowa, Saxony shall be a kingdom, so it shall! The Prussian Government, it appears, had got hold of some de- spatch or other, which Count Beust wished to be kept secret, or rather of the drift of that despatch, and in the exercise of its discretion communicated it to the Saxon Premier. Con- sidering that the control of foreign affairs has been surrendered by Saxony to the Confederation, of which Prussia is the fore- most member, and her King the head, that is very much as if if Lord Clarendon had confidentially communicated an American despatch to the Viceroy of Ireland, a step no more requiring or justifying foreign interference or comment than any remark made by one member of the Cabinet to another. But to con- sider it a domestic transaction is to assent to the quite true assertion that Saxony is, in fact, if not in name, a Prussian.
province, and this Count Beust cannot endure to do. So he publishes his discontent to all the world, earning thereby a terrible rap on the knuckles from Berlin for his forgetfulness of dignity, and deepening the conviction that he is hostile not only to the idea of a united Germany, but to the modus vivendi established after Sadowa, which arrangement he all the while asserts it is his determination honestly to maintain. That he is hostile to it needs no proof, and that he may for his master's interest be right in his hostility we have no desire to waste time in disproving ; but surely a statesman feeling such hostility would wait his opportunity of giving to his hatred ade- quate expression in action, not engage in literary war, at once most childish and most exasperating. Suppose Prussia has vio- lated a diplomatic etiquette, what then ? Prussia will not be the weaker for that. It may be very trying to Herr von Beust's amour propre, just as it would be very trying to him to be coldly received in an audience ; but the point is, not his per- sonality, but the permanent interest of the great Empire which he represents, and which is injured when its represen- tative condescends to complain publicly of what at worst would be a trivial indecorum. There is vanity of a very petty kind in such a display of wounded feeling,—the vanity of a diplomatist who thinks that he is his country,—and localism besides. We suppose Count Beust's idea is to show himself on all occasions the protector of the dependent States ; but is not that idea proof that he is only a diplomatist, and a diplo- matist of the Frankfort school, with whom Waldeck was a state as well as Prussia ? If the events of 1866 proved anything it was that the sympathies of the little Courts of Germany, however carefully cultivated or strongly pronounced, did not signify a straw in the great march of events ; that when it came to a collision, they had either to recede or to be pushed out of the way ; that Austria would, on the whole, have boen better off without their embarrassing help, To play the game of 1849 in face of the facts of 1869 is poor statesmanship ; to play it weakly through newspaper leaders instead of protocols, little speeches instead of orders to march, and querulous despatches instead of campaigns, is folly. What with his expressions of love for the foreigner, and his little exhibitions of jealousy in German affairs—with which he has no more to do than with English affairs,—and his tendency to writing and speech- making, Count Beust leaves the impression that he is the kind of man who could write the history of an empire, but neither build nor save one. He is a clever critic, not a founder.
Previous page
