TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE STRUGGLE IN THE HAPSBURG DOMINION.
THEprospect before the Hapsburgs is not a cheerful one. The note of their house for ages has been a singular power of surviving heavy blows, of extracting the means of success from even extreme misfortune, but we doubt if the house ever found itself in a tighter place than at this moment. They have survived a whole series of defeats, by the Turks, by Frederick the Great, by Napoleon III., and by William I., through the devotion to them of two dominant castes, the Germans in the Cisleithan States and the Magyars in Hungary ; and now it seems as if this devotion had exhausted itself, and was about to fail them. Like the devotion of the English garrison in Ireland, it has always bad a price—the pre- servation of their ascendency over a less civilised majority of fellow-subjects—and now it is doubtful if the Haps- burgs can pay that price any longer. The causa causans of the trouble—the decree by which the Badeni Ministry made the German and Slavic languages officially equal in all the States outside Hungary—may be got over, for the High Court has the right to declare that decree illegal, and is believed to be inclined to do so ; but that decree was only a symptom, and its removal will not remove the disease. The truth is, the Slays of all denomina- tions—Czechs, Ruthenians, Poles, Slovacks, or Croats —are wea, y of being governed by races towards whom they have gradually approximated in civilisation, and whom they have ceased to fear. The storm has not fairly broken out in Hungary, where the Slav ad- vance has not been so rapid, and where the dominant caste has singular energy and political judgment, but in Austria it is raging, and threatens all that exist. The Slays there, who are in a majority of two to one—say, broadly, sixteen millions to eight—deny the right of the German third to rule them, and intend to use the Parliament, in which they have a permanent majority, to upset ascendency altogether, if not to transfer the ascendency from their rivals to themselves. The Germans are not only furious, they are white round the lips. They declare, in so many words, that the Slays are not their equals in civilisation, in character, or in ability for self-government, and refuse, whatever the consequences may be, to pass under their legal rule. Austria, they affirm, shall be a German State, and the Emperor a German Prince, or they will appeal to their brethren in the North, will abandon the house of Hapsburg, and will transfer their loyalty to the house of Hohenzollern, which at all events knows, in its Polish provinces, how to keep Slays down. Of course this idea is not proclaimed openly by cultivated men, because there are still prisons in Vienna and Prague, and firing- parties still obey the Emperor's nod; but it is uttered quietly wherever it is safe, and is thundered out by mobs in the form of the Prussian war - song, the " Wacht am Rhein," which is sung everywhere that Germans congregate, even in the Hereditary States. Imagine the state of feeling in Hampshire before it sung an American battle-hymn. The very Tyrolese, the house knights, as it were, of the dynasty, are muttering, while they condemn the ungentlemanliness of their repre- sentatives, that they are Germans first of all ; while the Viennese, who have so often received the Hapsburgs after a defeat with hearty cheers and expressions of devotion, are only kept from rebellion by the presence of the enor- mous garrison. It is exceedingly doubtful whether the Germans will be conciliated by the appointment of a German Premier ; while it is not doubtful that if that Premier rules on "German principles "—that is, defends the ancient ascendency—the Slav majority will become disloyal, and possibly even recalcitrant against the Imperial officials. They say, and think, that, being a majority, the right to govern a constitutional State is theirs ; and that they will do it, let the German minority writhe or protest or resist as they please. They are as furious as the Teutons, though no doubt more shallow, they are just as brave, and though their own aristocracy are opposed to them, at least so far as any defiance of the Emperor is concerned, they have, as they believe, efficient leaders.
If the reader will reflect that precisely the same condi- tion of affairs exists in Hungary, with the exception that the Magyars, though in a still smaller minority, contrive through a clever manipulation of elections still to rule their Parliament ; that the feelings we have described must exist in one form or another throughout the Army ; and that any appeal from the classes to the masses would give the supremacy to the Slays, who are overwhelmingly superior in numbers, he will understand that the Emperor is in a dilemma from which it will take Providence to extricate him. If he declares himself neutral, which would be the British idea, he in fact abdicates, and surrenders the Empire to be a battlefield of nationalities. If he declares himself German, as till 1866 he implicitly did, he incurs the hatred, and will ultimately incur the resist- ance, of two-thirds of his subjects ; while if he declares himself Slav, as his grandfather is said to have advised his descendants to do whenever their position became desperate, he must govern the higher race of his subjects " by prerogative," that is, by the sword, with the certainty that forty millions of their countrymen will sooner or later pour to their assistance. The Hohenzollerns may be- loyal enough to an ally, but there can be no doubt that they sympathise with Germans in any conflict whatever against any other race, or that the prospect of reigning from the mouths of the Elbe to the Adriatic would stir the blood of a dynasty much less ambitious than the descendants of the Markgrafs of Brandenburg, who have been adding province to province for so many hundred years. An Emperor oppressed by such a weight of con- flicting circumstances must temporise, and it is this which we look to see Francis Joseph try to do. The worst of it is that no temporising can cure the evil, for the- nationalities have lived together without learning to like each other for more than three hundred years, and that as regards the immediate future, temporising may increase instead of diminishing the danger. The Emperor is an elderly man, and he will be succeeded by men who have none of his influence with his subjects, none of his ex- perience, and none of the self-restraint which a lifetime of defeat and success, disappointment and compensations have imposed upon his originally despotic spirit.
It is, of course, ridiculous to prophesy in so complicated a conjuncture. Some Minister of genius may fulfil Mr. Gladstone's anticipation, and devise a Federal system which all the nationalities will think fair, and which will leave the Emperor master of foreign policy and the Army. Or, and more probably, the Germans and Magyars, awaking to their extreme danger, may unite their forces, and as a dominant caste of fifteen millions, may revise the Con- stitution, and continue for another half - century to administer the Empire. Or, and most probably of all, the Germans, finding that Berlin, with enemies on each side, shrinks from breaking with the Hapsburgs, may sullenly reconcile themselves to remain in what would then be a Slav Empire in the position they recently occupied in Russia, not ruling, but still relied on as the most efficient and prosperous class of all the Em- peror's subjects. But for the time being we confess we see no alternative but administration by the Emperor himself, which will be successful or otherwise according to the wisdom of his advisers and the temper of his Army. That Army has been organised for thirty years to meet this very contingency, its rulers having en- deavoured with great adroitness and persistency to turn it into a vast caste, without the feeling of nationality, with a loyalty directed to the Emperor alone, and with, among the officers, a " brotherhood " as pronounced as that of the Knights Templars or the Order of St. John. If they have succeeded completely the unity of the Em- pire is safe, for there is no force, either in Austria or Hungary, which can defy the Army—the soldiers in 1848 bad only muskets—but the solidariti of the Army has not been proved, and now, as ever, Prince Schwartzenberg's caustic epigram remains true : "You can do anything with bayonets—except sit on them."
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