subjects of less importance. Everything else was left to the Landtage.

A short criticism of this remarkable law will not be thought out of place. One is at first inclined to characterize the whole scheme as an ingenious arrangement for making government impossible. The system sanctions the existence of twenty-one * Parliaments; namely, eighteen Landtage, a Reichsrath, and the two Delegations, which, by a slight stretch of the imagination, may, perhaps, be regarded as one body. Each of these Parliaments has a sphere of its own, in which it is completely independent of the rest. Nay, more; each is provided with the means of most effectually paralysing the action of the other. Let us take a few instances. The delegations may declare so many men necessary for the defence of the country, and so much money requisite for their maintenance. The Reichsrath may refuse to grant the men or the supplies, or both. Again, the Reichsrath may make general arrangements for the management of the schools, the Landtage may refuse to carry them out. Again, the Landtage may make regulations of their own, the Reichsrath may refuse to give them the money to bring them into effect. The only Parliament which represents the unity of the State has not the power of voting a man or a kreuzer; the only ministers which represent the unity of the State (viz., the three Reichsminister) are not responsible to the body which votes the supplies. The wonder is not that such a system should fail to work smoothly, but that it should succeed in working at all.

But there is another side to the picture. A constitution is not built in a day, least of all in a State composed as Austria is composed. It must not be forgotten that the December constitution, as it is called, was Austria's first honest attempt to combine State-unity with popular freedom. The great Kaiser Joseph II., had spent a lifetime in striving to weld together the heterogeneous elements of the empire by mechanical means, but was forced on his death-bed to confess that his labours had been in vain. After the popular movements of 1848 the Vienna statesman, Bach, took in hand the same task. With an army of soldiers and officials he strove to convert Austria into a centralized State after the pattern of modern France, but two days -the days of Magenta and Solferino-undid the painful work which it had taken ten years to build up. What Bach had

attempted to attain by absolutism, Schmerling tried to accomplish by a pretended appeal to the popular voice. This states

*This is exclusive of the three parliaments of the other half of the empire; the Reichstag and the Hungarian and Croatian Landtage.

man

man knew that the provinces were inveterately opposed to all schemes of centralization, and that no direct appeal to the country could give him a parliamentary majority pledged to any such scheme. He therefore contrived, by means of his famous system of groups, to obtain a fictitious parliamentary majority, while, by a strict censorship of the press and prohibition of public meeting, he silenced all extra-parliamentary complaints. The refusal of the Hungarians and Croatians to sit in a House thus constituted at last brought this Rump Parliament into contempt, and, after a reign of four years, the February constitution came to an untimely end. Then followed the so-called Sistirungsperiod,* when the policy of centralization was given up without anything being put in its place, a policy which succeeded in irritating all parties and satisfying none, presided over by a man whose weak concessions gave more annoyance than the hostile measures of his predecessors. Finally, in the spring of 1867, Beust came into power, and the new constitution which has been described in the above sketch was brought into existence. This constitution, while retaining the group-system of voting, throws away the other crutches on which the February constitution had rested. It neither bids for the corrupt support of the Church, nor puts an undue pressure on the liberty of the press and of public meeting. It is centralizing in spirit without being despotic in origin.

Before criticizing it, then, too harshly, we must consider the immense difficulty of the problem it attempts to solve. Austria is composed of a number of small nations, several of which, as e. g., Bohemia and Hungary, have separate histories of their own, and none of which, if we except the two central counties of Austria proper, are bound to the rest by any ties but those of common interest. No bonds of blood, of language, or of literature, bind the German to the Czech or Slovenian. The several provinces are inspired by a warm provincial patriotism, but a common Austrian patriotism there is none. In addition to these the cause of centralization is inextricably bound up in the minds of the whole non-German population with the cause of despotism. The vast majority know of no freedom but local freedom, and view even a constitutional Reichsrath as an instrument for the suppression of their local rights. This is enough to show the delicacy of the task which the statesmen of 1867 took in hand. How far they succeeded will be seen from the succeeding narrative. But before entering on the history of

*I.e., the period when the February constitution, without being abrogated, was allowed to fall into abeyance.

the

the great fight between the centralists and the autonomists, which commenced in the autumn of 1868, and the end of which is not yet, it will be well to conduct the campaign with the clerical party to its close.

In the spring of 1868 the Reichsrath again met, and the Upper House took in hand the marriage and education laws, which had passed the Lower House in the preceding session. The public took the greatest interest in the debate, as the fate of the Concordat was supposed to depend on the acceptance or rejection of these laws. Not only the galleries and the stairs, but the streets leading to the House, were filled with an excited crowd, and each member who left the chamber was breathlessly questioned by the people outside 'wie unsere Sachen oben stehen?' The following interesting account of this famous three days' debate is extracted from the German review 'Unsere Zeit,' May number, 1869:

The Austrian Herrenhaus has every reason to look back on those three days with pride. It exhibited such a high degree not only of statesmanlike capacity but of speaking power, that the feudal-clerical Graf Thun, instead of winning the laurels he expected, received humiliations without number. On the one side were men, who after bending long years under the clerical yoke, were at last able to stand boldly forth before their countrymen and utter the thoughts with which their "hearts had long been hot within them." On the other side were men, who after being supported for years by the Imperial bayonets and the Imperial police, were now left to fight their own battles-to maintain by argument what had before been maintained for them by force. The utter hollowness of the episcopal phrases, contrasted with the complacency with which they were uttered, the triumphant emphasis with which Prince-Cardinal Schwarzenberg, after a faltering speech "full of vain words signifying nothing," descended the tribune exclaiming "Genirt mich gar nicht, wenn die Herren lachen" (the noble lords' laughter won't discompose me) might have seemed fit subject for a comedy, if one could have forgotten the tragedy to which it formed the sequel.

The division was a drama in itself. It was the afternoon of Saturday, the 21st of March. As each name was called out, there was a breathless silence in the House, and storms of applause arose if the answerer gave his vote against the Concordat, the result being instantly passed from mouth to mouth till it reached the street, where it was received with fresh hurrahs. At last the numbers were known. The motion for adjournment was lost by 65 to 34, and the fate of the Concordat could be said to be sealed. Once more Austria's good genius had prevailed.'

The bishops were so disgusted at the results of this division that they refused to appear again during the debates of the

session.

session. Hence the marriage law, as well as the school law, were passed by large majorities.

Encouraged by this success the Lower House set to work at the third bill indicated in Herbst's programme, which was to decree the equality of all religions in the eyes of the law interconfessionelles Gesetz.' This bill provided that, in the case of children whose parents had died without expressing their wishes on the subject, the sons should be brought up in the father's, the daughters in the mother's religion. At the age of fourteen, however, the child was to be allowed to choose for itself. Infidelity was no longer to incapacitate a citizen for inheritance: the preaching of infidel, i. e., unchristian, doctrines no longer to constitute a misdemeanour. No citizen was to be compelled to contribute to the services, or to send his child to the schools, of a church to which he did not belong. No priest was to be able to deny the right of burial to a member of another religious sect in cases where either the family claiming the right had a private vault, or where the churchyard was the only one in the parish. This important law, the last clause of which especially put an end to a series of scandals which had for a long time been a disgrace to the country, was passed without difficulty by both Houses.

In the meantime the bishops had not been idle. Their first attempt was to bring a petition against the three bills to the Kaiser over the heads of the Ministry. Franz Joseph treated this attempt with becoming dignity, by referring the petitioners to his constitutional advisers.' Their next resort was, as might have been expected, to Rome. The Pope determined to make use of all his spiritual weapons, and, on the 22nd of June, launched a characteristic allocution at the heads of the Austrian rebels. In this document the three laws in question were denounced as 'destructive, abominable, and damnable.' 'Therefore,' so runs the allocution, on the strength of our Apostolic authority, we anathematize these laws, in particular all such clauses as are directed by the Austrian Government against the rights of the Church: and we declare the laws by virtue of this same authority to be null and void.' Popes have often taken foolish and impolitic steps, but it remained for Pope Pius IX. openly to urge the subjects of a Catholic kingdom in the nineteenth century to rebellion against their Government. The allocution proved as unsuccessful as it was gross. It is true that the bishops adhered faithfully to the instructions of their chief. Riccabona of Trient declared that any one who submitted to the May laws was a despiser of the Son of God. Schwarzenberg directed his clergy, in a pastoral letter to the four Bohemian

Bohemian bishops, to refuse confession and absolution to any couple joined by a civil marriage. But the mass of the laity rose up in indignation against the proceedings of the Pope and his advisers. Addresses poured in from every large town in the empire denouncing the Romish pretensions, and expressing sympathy with the Government. In fact the priests defeated their own ends by the extravagance of their measures, and hastened to bring about a crisis which a conciliatory policy might have indefinitely delayed. The final act which closed the campaign between Church and State is known to every one. In July, 1870, Graf Beust abrogated the Concordat.

It is now proposed to pass from the field of clerical agitation to a more important and interesting question. The contest between the Pope and Count Beust could have had but one end. The Pope's pretensions were an anachronism, and the struggle only interests us as illustrating one of the main intellectual movements which characterize the age in which we live. It is otherwise with the question at issue between the federalists and the centralists. It is not too much to say that of all the countries on the face of the earth, Austria is the one which at the present moment offers most to the study of the political philosopher. The statesmen now engaged in reconstructing her have few, if any, precedents to fall back on. If they succeed in their enterprise, they will have solved the most difficult problem of practical politics of which the present century has been a witness.

In order to make good this statement a few statistics will be necessary. Cisleithanian Austria contains a population of 19 millions, of which 6 millions are Germans, while the remaining 11 millions belong to the Slavonian race. In eight of the Austrian provinces, viz., in Bohemia, Moravia, Galicia, Krain, Istria, Gorz, Triest, and Dalmatia, the Slaves constitute the large majority of the population. If they were represented in Parliament according to their numbers, 117 of the 203 members of the Reichsrath would be Slaves, the remaining minority of 86 representing the other nationalities. How different the facts of the case are, any one who knows anything of Austrian politics can testify. The question then naturally arises, how is it that these Slaves possess so little political significance? The inquiry admits of many answers. The cause of their political insignificance is to be traced to a peculiar combination of historical, geographical, ethnological, religious, and social circumstances. In the first place they have stood almost uniformly in respect of the Italians in Istria and Triest, and in respect of the Germans elsewhere in Austria, in the relation of conquered to conquerors. In the second place, the Slaves are scattered over the face of

the