He

he had bidden to his presence were assembled. addressed to them a very short, evidently unstudied, discourse, as firm in its sense as in the tone in which it was delivered, and the purport of which was, that to the army Austria owed her security at the present hour, that upon the army he counted with implicit faith, and that, should the occasion require it, he should be ready at all hours to put himself at the head of the troops. After this, addressed to all, he advanced, and in his conversation with each separate individual, gave some personal proof of his remembrance or of his affability.

With the abdication of the Emperor Ferdinand ceases all connection between Austria and the past; with the accession of Franz Josef to the Imperial Crown opens for her an era so entirely new, that history, I think, offers few examples of anything to which this regeneration, this Verjüngung, as it is called, of Austria can be compared.

CHAPTER IX.

FRANZ JOSEF AND AUSTRIA.

WHEN the young Emperor came to the throne, his first proclamation, dated the 2nd of December, the very day of his accession, contained these words: 'Upon the basis of real liberty, upon the foundation of the equal rights of all the nations of our Empire, and the equality of all citizens before the law, as also upon the right of the representatives of the people to be associated in the work of government, upon these bases, upon these foundations, must the State be built, and our fatherland rise up in all its ancient glory, but with renewed and younger strength, a strong edifice against the tempests of the age, a vast home for all the various races which a brotherly bond has united for centuries past under the sceptre of our ancestors."

In those few words are to be found all the ideas which produce difficulty of governing in Austria. But first of all comes the question of "Equal Rights" (Gleichberechtigung) of "all nations." There is the source of the whole, and out of that flows the endless discussion which is now dividing the politicians and the populations of Austria: centralization or decentralization. This internal question is split into almost as many lesser differences as the external one of the General German Confederation, the Deutsche Bund. Books without end, pamphlets, brochures, petitions, reclamations, representations, every recognized form has been resorted to in which, upon this. subject, to spread dissentient opinions over the country.

The Ministers, under the presidence of Prince Schwarzenberg, hold to the centralizing system with inflexible tenacity, and seem to become but more. enamoured of it the greater the opposition they encounter in the execution of their plan. Even M. de Thun, who was a renowned champion of the Tcheques, and one of the great defenders of national rights, seems to have renounced his early tendencies, and to have become a no less determined centralisateur, than Prince Schwarzenberg or M. Bach.

That every act of the Ministry tends to compress

Austria, with its heterogeneous component parts, more and more into the form adopted since the Revolution of '89 for homogeneous France, cannot be denied; whether the experiment will succeed, whether the thing be possible, and if possible, advantageous; these are I think questions not easy to decide, and the solution of which may be fraught with some danger yet to come.

The system of centralisation has not succeeded in France, and, as I have observed, it is a system born immediately of the Revolution. To adopt this system at the very moment when it is most necessary to oppose the growth of the revolutionary spirit everywhere, is perhaps scarcely wise, especially in countries where that revolutionary spirit is antipopular, and where the surest means of resisting and vanquishing it altogether lie in the force of historical and national traditions. In France even, the serious thought of the positive necessity of decentralising before anything stable can be erected, is in the contemplation of almost every reflecting man; and it is somewhat strange that, the very moment in which France condemns the experiment fifty years have proved to be an unsafe one, should be the moment chosen by her imitators for the attempt to copy.

"Les plus dangereuses de toutes les révolutions sont celles qui viennent d'en haut," is a phrase often repeated, and the truth of which has been but too well proved by the late history of France. In Austria such a revolution is the only one to be feared, but its consequences may be fatal, and the so-called liberalism and constitutionalism of the aristocratical ministers of Franz Josef may, in the end, produce effects which all the rhapsodies of all the radicals upon the globe would fail in calling forth.

The monarchical principle is, in all these countries, bound up inseparably with their history, with their national traditions; and if one is attempted to be effaced, the integrity of the other may suffer in the end. It is a curious fact, that in Austria the so-called "Liberals" belong to the generation preceding our own, and are to be found in the men of middle age; whereas the historical and traditional ideas (what are commonly looked upon as belonging to times gone by) are represented by the young* and the active of the present day. The Liberalism of the doctrinaires (for such they essentially are) in

*I do not speak of the republican and revolutionist denizens of certain Universities, but of the great majority of the youth