NEWS OF THE WEEK
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WE have dealt elsewhere with the death of the Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria, and will only say here that the House of Hapsbarg cannot be said to have gone down in glory.—The assumption that it has gone down is, we think, fully justified.— When the full history of the Austrian side of the war comes to be told, it will be found that the Austrian Government throughout the past two years has been little more than a huge murder machine. In Italian Tirol, in Trieste, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Dalmatia, in Croatia, in Bohemia, in Transylvania, in the Bukovina, and in a dozen other provinces, the hangman and the firing party have been perpetually at work. As far as can be gathered, one of the few things in which the late Emperor took a personal interest was the destruction of these so-called traitors, and the decimation of mutinous battalions of Slays, Italians, or Rumanians who dared to remember the ties of race rather than those of slavish devotion to a monarchy which had so often spurned them.
