the empire, the Czechs in the north, the Poles in the east, the Slovenians in the south, and have thus lost the opportunity of political contact. In the third place, they do not all speak the same language nor profess the same religion, the Ruthenians of Galicia e.g., belonging to the Eastern Church. Lastly, they compose for the most part the peasantry of the country, and possess, with the exception of the Poles, no influential middle class and no national nobility.

Of the Austrian Slaves, about 5,000,000 are Czechs, 2,320,000 Poles, 3,000,000 Ruthenians, 1,200,000 Slovenians. To be added to these are 600,000 Italians, and a small number of Rumanians in the Bukowina. All these stocks have a distinct individuality of their own, and many of them, as e. g., the Poles and Czechs, have a past history to look back on.

The Poles are the people which have identified themselves least with the empire to which they belong. The one thought of the Polish patriot is the restoration of his country to its lost rights. At the same time, they have been treated, at least of late years, with great consideration by the Government, and have never carried their opposition to any extreme length. The tie which binds them to Austria is their hatred of Russia. They know that the disintegration of Austria would probably involve their annexation to the hated Russian, and hence their support can be reckoned on in the most perilous questions of foreign politics. The late President of the Cisleithanian Ministry, Graf Potocki, is a Pole; the Polish members are treated very much like the Irish members in our Commons, and are left to decide questions of purely Polish policy for themselves; many politicians hope by a coalition between the Germans and Poles to overbear the opposition of the remaining Slaves.

The Czechs, like the Poles, have a certain history of their own. The student of history will remember that Bohemia was originally a settlement of the Marcomanni, a German tribe who migrated there in the 5th century. This Teutonic stock was, however, overflooded towards the close of the same century by a new migration of Slavish tribes, who displaced the original inhabitants in very much the same way as the Saxons displaced the Britons in our own island. The heads of these tribes formed the beginning of the Czechish nobility. The semi-barbarous Slaves who thus obtained a footing in the country were Christianized and civilized by a new influx of German merchants and German clergy. In process of time the prosperity of these settlers and the favour shown to them by the Kings of Bohemia drew down on them the envy of the Czechs, and in the 16th cen tury began that terrible persecution, which, assuming the form of a religious

a religious war between Hussites and Catholics, in reality was a contest between the two races for the supremacy in Bohemia. The Hussites prevailed, and the Czechs were for a long time dominant. Then came the still more terrible days when the sword of the German Kaiser brought retribution for the blood shed by the Hussites, and reinstated Germanism and Catholicism in their ancient place. Since those times until a comparatively late date the Czechs had much right to consider themselves an oppressed race. The policy of persecution, as is almost always the case, gave fresh life and energy to the nationality which it was its purpose to destroy. Long the Czechs bore their sorrows in secret. At last the revolutionary year of 1848 seemed to offer them fresh hopes of liberation from the yoke under which they chafed. Their ambition was to come forward as the leaders of the Austrian Slaves, and to win for themselves, the Slovenians and Croatians, the place in the Austrian constitution to which their numbers entitled them. But the chilling years of Bachian despotism followed, and once more they relapsed, if not into apathy, at least into sullen silence. Then the February constitution once more raised their hopes. In spite of Schmerling's artificial group-system, which procured him a German majority from Bohemia and Moravia, the Czechs took their places in the Reichsrath, hoping, with the help of the Hungarians and Croatians, to be able to offer a successful resistance to the Germans. But the Hungarians and Croatians, as we have seen, refused to appear, and the Czechs, finding themselves in a hopeless minority, left the Reichsrath, never since then to enter it again. Again the Sistirungspolitik' of Belcredi raised their hopes. They had secured a majority in the Bohemian and Moravian Landtage, and intended in the extraordinary Parliament to be convoked under that Minister's auspices to enter the campaign against centralism and dualism, reckoning on the support of the Hungarians in their resistance to the centralists, and on the support of the Germans in their resistance to the dualists. Once more they were doomed to be disappointed. Count Beust came into power, and, after passing the 'Ausgleich' with Hungary, with the help of a German majority raised by an unsparing use of Court influence and the Schmerlingian groups, reduced them again to an impotent minority. They saw the German party once more victors over the whole line, and once more retreated to their old position of dogged resistance. It was in vain that the December constitution offered them freedom. They refused to eat of the feast which they had had no hand in preparing. It is not our intention to give a detailed account of the modes in which their resistance asserted itself, in the Landtag, in

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the school, in the press, in the public meeting; it has been deemed sufficient to describe the constitution which was offered them, to attest the discontent with which it was met, and to trace the causes of this discontent.

One thing must be carefully borne in mind by anyone who is really anxious to understand the character of this long quarrel. It does not follow that, because the Germans have generally identified themselves with the party of intellectual and religious progress, this particular political principle which they advocate is a more liberal one than that of their opponents. The love of domination is apt to obscure the judgment of the most impartial minds, and the German race, wise and peaceable as it for the most part is, shares the common failing. A foreigner in Austria is peculiarly apt to be misled in their respect. Almost all the literature that he reads is German, and bears the stamp of the German ideas. He finds the federalists allied with the clerical and reactionary party, he listens to the quaint claims which they prefer on the grounds of the 'historical 'rights of the 'kingdom' of Bohemia and the indefeasible privileges' of the Landtage, he naturally compares the provinces of Austria to the counties, the Landtage to the Municipal Assemblies, of his own country, and decides that the Reichsrath is perfectly right in disallowing such preposterous claims. He is apt to forget that though unity of language and political institutions is an undoubted advantage, the forcible spread of this unity is as undoubted an evil: that freedom is one thing, the forcible propagation even of the freest ideas another. He must strip such phrases as the 'Mission of Teutonism,' the 'superiority of Western civilization,' of their vague surroundings, and lay bare to view the unlovely realities -the race-domination and race-hatred-which they serve to disguise. Still more must he be on his guard against such phrases, when under the form of a spurious Darwinism, they attempt to assume a philosophical garb. No more flagrant contravention of Nature's principle of selection can be imagined, than a system of persecution, which instead of gradually substituting higher for lower forms of life, kindles in the decaying forms an artificial vigour, and so counteracts the process which it is its aim to further. The proportion of the Czechs to the Germans in Bohemia and Moravia, says Von Helfert, is actually greater now, after all the efforts of successive Kaisers and Kanzlers, than it was a century ago.

Again it is important not to be misled by those main stumblingblocks to the formation of an impartial judgment-political analogies. To an Englishman the Austrian-German will reply 'We repress the Czechs on the same principle that you repress

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the Fenians; holding that their wishes cannot be gratified without danger to the general well-being of the empire.' To the NorthGerman he will say 'The possession of a single administrative and legislative system is as much an advantage for Austria as it is for North-Germany: if you advocate the suppression of your petty dukedoms and princedoms, how can you consistently condemn the abrogation of provincial independence in Austria?' The answer that the federalist might make to these and similar arguments lies on the surface. Unity of administration is only so far good as there exists a unity in the material administrated. There can be no universal rule laid down in this question. From certain points of view it would no doubt be an advantage for France and Germany to be governed from a single centre; but there are other points of view from which it would be an unquestionable evil. The question to be considered is, whether there exists in the various nationalities of which Austria is composed a sufficient unity of political purpose to justify the maintenance of a central administration. Apart from this argument, there are many who uphold federalism as the means to a more complete and representative centralism; who consider the establishment of a federal system as the only practical method for ridding the Government of the traditions of German supremacy. A central system, say they, should be the result of the voluntary cohesion of the political units; the movement which produces it should come from the extremities and not from the centre itself. But under the present régime a movement of this sort is impossible. Give the provinces autonomy and it will not be long before they recognize the advantages of unity.

Turning now from the general question at issue between the two parties, let us ask what are the practical claims put forward by the Austrian Slaves and their chief spokesmen the Czechs? They ask first of all for the abolition of the Schmerlingian groupsystem, the natural and almost necessary result of which would be the election of a Slavish majority to the Reichsrath, and the establishment by this majority of a federal constitution—a constitution indeed which in such an event the Germans would be the first to demand. Then comes the main difficulty. The Germans urge with much force that the Landtage dominated by a Slavish majority would in all probability make a tyrannical use of their new power, and treat the Germans very much worse than the Germans had treated them. Dr. Fischhof proposes to obviate this difficulty in the following manner. Either, he says, the Landtag might be divided into two different chambers for the two prevailing nationalities, and each chamber be given in certain questions a power of vetoing the resolutions of the other:

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or, the representatives of the two nationalities might debate in common, but vote in separate curies, the sanction of each cury being necessary for the carrying of certain laws. He proposes to restrict the right of separate voting to questions connected with education and language.

The tyranny of the majority' in the Reichsrath would be obviated according to his plan still more simply. He would turn the Upper House into a Senate on the American principle. Each province would here have an equal voice. The Lower House would then be no longer chosen indirectly, through the Landtage, but directly by the people themselves, while each Landtag would send an equal number of members to the Upper House. As it happens, in eight of the seventeen provinces of Cisleithania there is a majority of Germans, so that the preponderance of the Slaves in the Lower House would be checked by the almost equal balance of power in the Upper House. The two Houses would thus in De Tocqueville's words respectively represent the principles of population and federation.

It is not very probable that any so radical scheme will be adopted for the present by the Austrian Parliament. And yet the existing state of things is perilous in the extreme, and evidently calls for some heroic remedy. The centralist Ministry, which took office after the passing of the 'Ausgleich' with Hungary, succumbed in the winter of 1869 to the opposition of the Czechs and the Poles. Though commanding a majority in the Reichsrath, they represented the minority of the nation, and their government was an anomaly. Graf Potocki, the Pole, was then appointed Minister-President. His intention was to carry a gradual scheme of federation, beginning with Galicia. But he failed to conciliate the Czechs, who showed no wish to help the Poles to a liberty which they were not sure of securing for themselves afterwards. Hence the Government was left in a hopeless minority, for the German party, with a culpable want of patriotism, refused to support Potocki, and passed in the autumn of 1870 a vote of want of confidence against the Ministry. The Kaiser and Count Beust were involved in an apparently inextricable dilemma. Government by the majority, and government by the minority of the Reichsrath, had both been tried in the balances, and been found wanting. There ensued an interregnum of eight weeks. At last the list of new ministers, which had been kept completely secret till the morning of publication, was published in the Wiener Zeitung.' The list contained the names of a number of hitherto unknown men. Not a single member of the new government had ever sat in the Reichsrath or the Landtag, and two of them were born Czechs.

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