[Hopes of the Papacy.]

A third current of opinion in these years of hope and of illusion was that represented in the writings of Gioberti, the depicter of a new and glorious Italy, regenerated not by philosophic republicanism or the sword of a temporal monarch, but by the moral force of a reformed and reforming Papacy. The conception of the Catholic Church as a great Liberal power, strange and fantastic as it now appears, was no dream of an isolated Italian enthusiast; it was an idea which, after the French Revolution of 1830, and the establishment of a government at once anti-clerical and anti-democratic, powerfully influenced some of the best minds in France, and found in Montalembert and Lamennais exponents who commanded the ear of Europe. If the corruption of the Papacy had been at once the spiritual and the political death of Italy, its renovation in purity and in strength would be also the resurrection of the Italian people. Other lands had sought, and sought in vain, to work out their problems under the guidance of leaders antagonistic to the Church, and of popular doctrines divorced from religious faith. To Italy belonged the prerogative of spiritual power.

By this power, aroused from the torpor of ages, and speaking, as it had once spoken, to the very conscience of mankind, the gates of a glorious future would be thrown open. Conspirators might fret, and politicians scheme, but the day on which the new life of Italy would begin would be that day when the head of the Church, taking his place as chief of a federation of Italian States, should raise the banner of freedom and national right, and princes and people alike should follow the all-inspiring voice.

[Election of Pius IX., June, 1846.]

[Reforms expected from Pius.]

[Ferrara, June, 1847.]

A monk, ignorant of everything but cloister lore, benighted, tyrannical, the companion in his private life of a few jolly priests and a gossiping barber, was not an alluring emblem of the Church of the future. But in 1846 Pope Gregory XVI., who for the last five years had been engaged in one incessant struggle against insurgents, conspirators, and reformers, and whose prisons were crowded with the best of his subjects, pa.s.sed away.

[405] His successor, Mastai Ferretti, Bishop of Imola, was elected under the t.i.tle of Pius IX., after the candidate favoured by Austria had failed to secure the requisite number of votes (June 17). The choice of this kindly and popular prelate was to some extent a tribute to Italian feeling; and for the next eighteen months it appeared as it Gioberti had really divined the secret of the age. The first act of the new Pope was the publication of a universal amnesty for political offences. The prison doors throughout his dominions were thrown open, and men who had been sentenced to confinement for life returned in exultation to their homes. The act created a profound impression throughout Italy, and each good-humoured utterance of Pius confirmed the belief that great changes were at hand. A wild enthusiasm seized upon Rome. The population abandoned itself to festivals in honour of the Pontiff and of the approaching restoration of Roman liberty. Little was done; not much was actually promised; everything was believed. The principle of representative government was discerned in the new Council of State now placed by the side of the College of Cardinals; a more serious concession was made to popular feeling in the permission given to the citizens of Rome, and afterwards to those of the provinces, to enrol themselves in a civic guard. But the climax of excitement was reached when, in answer to a threatening movement of Austria, occasioned by the growing agitation throughout Central Italy, the Papal Court protested against the action of its late protector. By the Treaties of Vienna Austria had gained the right to garrison the citadel of Ferrara, though this town lay within the Ecclesiastical States. Placing a new interpretation on the expression used in the Treaties, the Austrian Government occupied the town of Ferrara itself (June 17th, 1847). The movement was universally understood to be the preliminary to a new occupation of the Papal States, like that of 1831; and the protests of the Pope against the violation of his territory gave to the controversy a European importance. The English and French fleets appeared at Naples; the King of Sardinia openly announced his intention to take the field against Austria if war should break out. By the efforts of neutral Powers a compromise on the occupation of Ferrara was at length arranged; but the pa.s.sions which had been excited were not appeased, and the Pope remained in popular imagination the champion of Italian independence against Austria, as well as the apostle of const.i.tutional Government and the rights of the people.

[Revolution at Palermo, Jan., 1848.]

In the meantime the agitation begun in Rome was spreading through the north and the south of the peninsula, and beyond the Sicilian Straits. The centenary of the expulsion of the Austrians from Genoa in December, 1746, was celebrated throughout central Italy with popular demonstrations which gave Austria warning of the storm about to burst upon it. In the south, however, impatience under domestic tyranny was a far more powerful force than the distant hope of national independence. Sicily had never forgotten the separate rights which it had once enjoyed, and the const.i.tution given to it under the auspices of England in 1812. Communications pa.s.sed between the Sicilian leaders and the opponents of the Bourbon Government on the mainland, and in the autumn of 1847 simultaneous risings took place in Calabria and at Messina. These were repressed without difficulty; but the fire smouldered far and wide, and on the 13th of January, 1848, the population of Palermo rose in revolt. For fourteen days the conflict between the people and the Neapolitan troops continued. The city was bombarded, but in the end the people were victorious, and a provisional government was formed by the leaders of the insurrection. One Sicilian town after another followed the example of the capital, and expelled its Neapolitan garrison. Threatened by revolution in Naples itself, King Ferdinand II., grandson of the despot of 1821, now imitated the policy of his predecessor, and proclaimed a const.i.tution. A Liberal Ministry was formed, but no word was said as to the autonomy claimed by Sicily, and promised, as it would seem, by the leaders of the popular party on the mainland. After the first excitement of success was past, it became clear that the Sicilians were as widely at variance with the newly-formed Government at Naples as with that which they had overthrown.

[Agitation in Austrian Italy.]

The insurrection of Palermo gave a new stimulus and imparted more of revolutionary colour to the popular movement throughout Italy.

Const.i.tutions were granted in Piedmont and Tuscany. In the Austrian provinces national exasperation against the rule of the foreigner grew daily more menacing. Radetzky, the Austrian Commander-in-chief, had long foreseen the impending struggle, and had endeavoured, but not with complete success, to impress his own views upon the imperial Government. Verona had been made the centre of a great system of fortifications, and the strength of the army under Radetzky's command had been considerably increased, but it was not until the eleventh hour that Metternich abandoned the hope of tiding over difficulties by his old system of police and spies, and permitted the establishment of undisguised military rule. In order to injure the finances of Austria, a general resolution had been made by the patriotic societies of Upper Italy to abstain from the use of tobacco, from which the Government drew a large part of its revenue. On the first Sunday in 1848 Austrian officers, smoking in the streets of Milan, were attacked by the people. The troops were called to arms: a conflict took place, and enough blood was shed to give to the tumult the importance of an actual revolt. In Padua and elsewhere similar outbreaks followed. Radetzky issued a general order to his troops, declaring that the Emperor was determined to defend his Italian dominion whether against an external or domestic foe.

Martial law was proclaimed; and for a moment, although Piedmont gave signs of throwing itself into the Italian movement, the awe of Austria's military power hushed the rising tempest. A few weeks more revealed to an astonished world the secret that the Austrian State, so great and so formidable in the eyes of friend and foe, was itself on the verge of dissolution.

[Austria.]

[Affairs in Hungary.]

It was to the absence of all stirring public life, not to any real a.s.similative power or any high intelligence in administration, that the House of Hapsburg owed, during the eighteenth century, the continued union of that motley of nations or races which successive conquests, marriages, and treaties had brought under its dominion. The violence of the attack made by the Emperor Joseph upon all provincial rights first re-awakened the slumbering spirit of Hungary; but the national movement of that time, which excited such strong hopes and alarms, had been succeeded by a long period of stagnation, and during the Napoleonic wars the repression of everything that appealed to any distinctively national spirit had become more avowedly than before the settled principle of the Austrian Court. In 1812 the Hungarian Diet had resisted the financial measures of the Government. The consequence was that, in spite of the law requiring its convocation every three years, the Diet was not again summoned till 1825. During the intermediate period, the Emperor raised taxes and levies by edict alone.

Deprived of its const.i.tutional representation, the Hungarian n.o.bility pursued its opposition to the encroachments of the Crown in the Sessions of each county. At these a.s.semblies, to which there existed no parallel in the western and more advanced States of the Continent, each resident land-owner who belonged to the very numerous caste of the n.o.blesse was ent.i.tled to speak and to vote. Retaining, in addition to the right of free discussion and pet.i.tion, the appointment of local officials, as well as a considerable share in the actual administration, the Hungarian county-a.s.semblies, handing down a spirit of rough independence from an immemorial past, were probably the hardiest relic of self-government existing in any of the great monarchical States of Europe. Ignorant, often uncouth in their habits, oppressive to their peasantry, and dominated by the spirit of race and caste, the ma.s.s of the Magyar n.o.bility had indeed proved as impervious to the humanising influences of the eighteenth century as they had to the solicitations of despotism. The Magnates, or highest order of n.o.blesse, who formed a separate chamber in the Diet, had been to some extent denationalised; they were at once more European in their culture, and more submissive to the Austrian Court. In banishing political discussion from the Diet to the County Sessions, the Emperor's Government had intensified the provincial spirit which it sought to extinguish. Too numerous to be won over by personal inducements, and remote from the imperial agencies which had worked so effectively through the Chamber of Magnates, the lesser n.o.bility of Hungary during these years of absolutism carried the habit of political discussion to their homes, and learnt to baffle the imperial Government by withholding all help and all information from its subordinate agents. Each county-a.s.sembly became a little Parliament, and a centre of resistance to the usurpation of the Crown. The stimulus given to the national spirit by this struggle against unconst.i.tutional rule was seen not less in the vigorous attacks made upon the Government on the re-a.s.sembling of the Diet in 1825, than in the demand that Magyar, and not Latin as heretofore, should be the language used in recording the proceedings of the Diet, and in which communications should pa.s.s between the Upper and the Lower House.

[Magyars and Slavs.]

There lay in this demand for the recognition of the national language the germ of a conflict of race against race which was least of all suspected by those by whom the demand was made. Hungary, as a political unity, comprised, besides the Slavic kingdom of Croatia, wide regions in which the inhabitants were of Slavic or Roumanian race, and where the Magyar was known only as a feudal lord. The district in which the population at large belonged to the Magyar stock did not exceed one-half of the kingdom. For the other races of Hungary, who were probably twice as numerous as themselves, the Magyars entertained the utmost contempt, attributing to them the moral qualities of the savage, and denying to them the possession of any nationality whatever. In a country combining so many elements ill-blended with one another, and all alike subject to a German Court at Vienna, Latin, as the language of the Church and formerly the language of international communication, had served well as a neutral means of expression in public affairs. There might be Croatian deputies in the Diet who could not speak Magyar; the Magyars could not understand Croatian; both could understand and could without much effort express themselves in the species of Latin which pa.s.sed muster at Presburg and at Vienna. Yet no freedom of handling could convert a dead language into a living one; and when the love of country and of ancient right became once more among the Magyars an inspiring pa.s.sion, it naturally sought a n.o.bler and more spontaneous utterance than dog-latin. Though no law was pa.s.sed upon the subject in the Parliament in which it was first mooted, speakers in the Diet of 1832 used their mother-tongue; and when the Viennese Government forbade the publication of the debates, reports were circulated in ma.n.u.script through the country by Kossuth, a young deputy, who after the dissolution of the Diet in 1836 paid for his defiance of the Emperor by three years' imprisonment.

[Hungary after 1830.]

[The Diet of 1832-36.]

[Szechenyi.]

Hungary now seemed to be entering upon an epoch of varied and rapid national development. The barriers which separated it from the Western world were disappearing. The literature, the ideas, the inventions of Western Europe were penetrating its archaic society, and transforming a movement which in its origin had been conservative and aristocratic into one of far-reaching progress and reform. Alone among the opponents of absolute power on the Continent, the Magyars had based their resistance on positive const.i.tutional right, on prescription, and the settled usage of the past; and throughout the conflict with the Crown between 1812 and 1825 legal right was on the side not of the Emperor but of those whom he attempted to coerce. With excellent judgment the Hungarian leaders had during these years abstained from raising any demand for reforms, appreciating the advantage of a purely defensive position in a combat with a Court pledged in the eyes of all Europe, as Austria was, to the defence of legitimate rights. This policy had gained its end; the Emperor, after thirteen years of conflict, had been forced to re-convoke the Diet, and to abandon the hope of effecting a work in which his uncle, Joseph II., had failed. But, the const.i.tution once saved, that narrow and exclusive body of rights for which the n.o.bility had contended no longer satisfied the needs or the conscience of the time. [406] Opinion was moving fast; the claims of the towns and of the rural population were making themselves felt; the agitation that followed the overthrow of the Bourbons in 1830 reached Hungary too, not so much through French influence as through the Polish war of independence, in which the Magyars saw a struggle not unlike their own, enlisting their warmest sympathies for the Polish armies so long as they kept the field, and for the exiles who came among them when the conflict was over. By the side of the old defenders of cla.s.s-privilege there arose men imbued with the spirit of modern Liberalism. The laws governing the relation of the peasant to his lord, which remained nearly as they had been left by Maria Theresa, were dealt with by the Diet of 1832 in so liberal a spirit that the Austrian Government, formerly far in advance of Hungarian opinion on this subject, refused its a.s.sent to many of the measures pa.s.sed.

Great schemes of social and material improvement also aroused the public hopes in these years. The better minds became conscious of the real aspect of Hungarian life in comparison with that of civilised Europe--of its poverty, its inertia, its boorishness. Extraordinary energy was thrown into the work of advance by Count Szechenyi, a n.o.bleman whose imagination had been fired by the contrast which the busy industry of Great Britain and the practical interests of its higher cla.s.ses presented to the torpor of his own country. It is to him that Hungary owes the bridge uniting its double capital at Pesth, and that Europe owes the unimpeded navigation of the Danube, which he first rendered possible by the destruction of the rocks known as the Iron Gates at Orsova. Sanguine, lavishly generous, an ardent patriot, Szechenyi endeavoured to arouse men of his own rank, the great and the powerful in Hungary, to the sense of what was due from them to their country as leaders in its industrial development. He was no revolutionist, nor was he an enemy to Austria. A peaceful political future would best have accorded with his own designs for raising Hungary to its due place among nations.

[Transylvania.]

That the Hungarian movement of this time was converted from one of fruitful progress into an embittered political conflict ending in civil war was due, among other causes, to the action of the Austrian Cabinet itself. Wherever const.i.tutional right existed, there Austria saw a natural enemy. The province of Transylvania, containing a mixed population of Magyars, Germans, and Roumanians, had, like Hungary, a Diet of its own, which Diet ought to have been summoned every year. It was, however, not once a.s.sembled between 1811 and 1834. In the agitation at length provoked in Transylvania by this disregard of const.i.tutional right, the Magyar element naturally took the lead, and so gained complete ascendancy in the province. When the Diet met in 1834, its language and conduct were defiant in the highest degree. It was speedily dissolved, and the scandal occasioned by its proceedings disturbed the last days of the Emperor Francis, who died in 1835, leaving the throne to his son Ferdinand, an invalid incapable of any serious exertion. It soon appeared that nothing was changed in the principles of the Imperial Government, and that whatever hopes had been formed of the establishment of a freer system under the new reign were delusive. The leader of the Transylvanian Opposition was Count Wesselenyi, himself a Magnate in Hungary, who, after the dissolution of the Diet, betook himself to the Sessions of the Hungarian counties, and there delivered speeches against the Court which led to his being arrested and brought to trial for high treason. His cause was taken up by the Hungarian Diet, as one in which the rights of the local a.s.semblies were involved. The plea of privilege was, however, urged in vain, and the sentence of exile which was pa.s.sed upon Count Wesselenyi became a new source of contention between the Crown and the Magyar Estates. [407]

[Parties among the Magyars.]

[The Diet of 1843.]

The enmity of Government was now a sufficient pa.s.sport to popular favour.

On emerging from his prison under a general amnesty in 1840, Kossuth undertook the direction of a Magyar journal at Pesth, which at once gained an immense influence throughout the country. The spokesman of a new generation, Kossuth represented an entirely different order of ideas from those of the orthodox defenders of the Hungarian Const.i.tution. They had been conservative and aristocratic; he was revolutionary: their weapons had been drawn from the storehouse of Hungarian positive law; his inspiration was from the Liberalism of western Europe. Thus within the national party itself there grew up sections in more or less p.r.o.nounced antagonism to one another, though all were united by a pa.s.sionate devotion to Hungary and by an unbounded faith in its future. Szechenyi, and those who with him subordinated political to material ends, regarded Kossuth as a dangerous theorist. Between the more impetuous and the more cautious reformers stood the recognised Parliamentary leaders of the Liberals, among whom Deak had already given proof of political capacity of no common order. In Kossuth's journal the national problems of the time were discussed both by his opponents and by his friends. Publicity gave greater range as well as greater animation to the conflict of ideas; and the rapid development of opinion during these years was seen in the large and ambitious measures which occupied the Diet of 1843. Electoral and munic.i.p.al reform, the creation of a code of criminal law, the introduction of trial by jury, the abolition of the immunity of the n.o.bles from taxation; all these, and similar legislative projects, displayed at once the energy of the time and the influence of western Europe in transforming the political conceptions of the Hungarian nation. Hitherto the forty-three Free Cities had possessed but a single vote in the Diet, as against the sixty-three votes possessed by the Counties. It was now generally admitted that this anomaly could not continue; but inasmuch as civic rights were themselves monopolised by small privileged orders among the townsmen, the problem of const.i.tutional reform carried with it that of a reform of the munic.i.p.alities. Hungary in short was now face to face with the task of converting its ancient system of the representation of the privileged orders into the modern system of a representation of the nation at large. Arduous at every epoch and in every country, this work was one of almost insuperable difficulty in Hungary, through the close connection with the absolute monarchy of Austria; through the existence of a body of poor n.o.blesse, numbered at two hundred thousand, who, though strong in patriotic sentiment, bitterly resented any attack upon their own freedom from taxation; and above all through the variety of races in Hungary, and the att.i.tude a.s.sumed by the Magyars, as the dominant nationality, towards the Slavs around them. In proportion as the energy of the Magyars and their confidence in the victory of the national cause mounted high, so rose their disdain of all claims beside their own within the Hungarian kingdom. It was resolved by the Lower Chamber of the Diet of 1843 that no language but Magyar should be permitted in debate, and that at the end of ten years every person not capable of speaking the Magyar language should be excluded from all public employment. The Magnates softened the latter provision by excepting from it the holders of merely local offices in Slavic districts; against the prohibition of Latin in the Diet the Croatians appealed to the Emperor. A rescript arrived from Vienna placing a veto upon the resolution. So violent was the storm excited in the Diet itself by this rescript, and so threatening the language of the national leaders outside, that the Cabinet, after a short interval, revoked its decision, and accepted a compromise which, while establishing Magyar as the official language of the kingdom, and requiring that it should be taught even in Croatian schools, permitted the use of Latin in the Diet for the next six years. In the meantime the Diet had shouted down every speaker who began with the usual Latin formula, and fighting had taken place in Agram, the Croatian capital, between the national and the Magyar factions.

[The Slavic national movements.]

It was in vain that the effort was made at Presburg to resist all claims but those of one race. The same quickening breath which had stirred the Magyar nation to new life had also pa.s.sed over the branches of the Slavic family within the Austrian dominions far and near. In Bohemia a revival of interest in the Czech language and literature, which began about 1820, had in the following decade gained a distinctly political character. Societies originally or professedly founded for literary objects had become the centres of a popular movement directed towards the emanc.i.p.ation of the Czech elements in Bohemia from German ascendancy, and the restoration of something of a national character to the inst.i.tutions of the kingdom. Among the southern Slavs, with whom Hungary was more directly concerned, the national movement first became visible rather later. Its earliest manifestations took, just as in Bohemia, a literary or linguistic form.

Projects for the formation of a common language which, under the name of Illyrian, should draw together all the Slavic populations between the Adriatic and the Black Sea, occupied for a while the fancy of the learned; but the more ambitious part of this design, which had given some umbrage to the Turkish Government, was abandoned in obedience to instructions from Vienna; and the movement first gained political importance when its scope was limited to the Croatian and Slavonic districts of Hungary, and it was endowed with the distinct task of resisting the imposition of Magyar as an official language. In addition to their representation in the Diet of the Kingdom at Presburg, the Croatian landowners had their own Provincial Diet at Agram. In this they possessed not only a common centre of action, but an organ of communication with the Imperial Government at Vienna, which rendered them some support in their resistance to Magyar pretensions. Later events gave currency to the belief that a conflict of races in Hungary was deliberately stimulated by the Austrian Court in its own interest. But the whole temper and principle of Metternich's rule was opposed to the development of national spirit, whether in one race or another; and the patronage which the Croats appeared at this time to receive at Vienna was probably no more than an instinctive act of conservatism, intended to maintain the balance of interests, and to reduce within the narrowest possible limits such changes as might prove inevitable.

[Agitation after 1843.]

Of all the important measures of reform which were brought before the Hungarian Diet of 1843, one alone had become law. The rest were either rejected by the Chamber of Magnates after pa.s.sing the Lower House, or were thrown out in the Lower House in spite of the approval of the majority, in consequence of peremptory instructions sent to Presburg by the county a.s.semblies. The representative of a Hungarian const.i.tuency was not free to vote at his discretion; he was the delegate of the body of n.o.bles which sent him, and was legally bound to give his vote in accordance with the instructions which he might from time to time receive. However zealous the Legislature itself, it was therefore liable to be paralysed by external pressure as soon as any question was raised which touched the privileges of the n.o.ble caste. This was especially the case with all projects involving the expenditure of public revenue. Until the n.o.bles bore their share of taxation it was impossible that Hungary should emerge from a condition of beggarly need; yet, be the inclination of the Diet what it might, it was controlled by bodies of stubborn squires or yeomen in each county, who fully understood their own power, and stoutly forbade the pa.s.sing of any measure which imposed a share of the public burdens upon themselves. The impossibility of carrying out reforms tinder existing conditions had been demonstrated by the failures of 1843. In order to overcome the obstruction as well of the Magnates as of the county a.s.semblies, it was necessary that an appeal should be made to the country at large, and that a force of public sentiment should be aroused which should both overmaster the existing array of special interests, and give birth to legislation merging them for the future in a comprehensive system of really national inst.i.tutions. To this task the Liberal Opposition addressed itself; and although large differences existed within the party, and the action of Kossuth, who now exchanged the career of the journalist for that of the orator, was little fettered by the opinions of his colleagues, the general result did not disappoint the hopes that had been formed. Political a.s.sociations and clubs took vigorous root in the country. The magic of Kossuth's oratory left every hearer a more patriotic, if not a wiser man; and an awakening pa.s.sion for the public good seemed for a while to throw all private interests into the shade.

[Government Policy of Reform.]

[Programme of the Opposition.]

It now became plain to all but the blindest that great changes were inevitable; and at the instance of the more intelligent among the Conservative party in Hungary the Imperial Government resolved to enter the lists with a policy of reform, and, if possible, to wrest the helm from the men who were becoming masters of the nation. In order to secure a majority in the Diet, it was deemed requisite by the Government first to gain a predominant influence in the county-a.s.semblies. As a preliminary step, most of the Lieutenants of counties, to whose high dignity no practical functions attached, were removed from their posts, and superseded by paid administrators, appointed from Vienna. Count Apponyi, one of the most vigorous of the conservative and aristocratic reformers, was placed at the head of the Ministry. In due time the proposals of the Government were made public. They comprised the taxation of the n.o.bles, a reform of the munic.i.p.alities, modifications in the land-system, and a variety of economic measures intended directly to promote the material development of the country. The latter were framed to some extent on the lines laid down by Szechenyi, who now, in bitter antagonism to Kossuth, accepted office under the Government, and gave to it the prestige of his great name. It remained for the Opposition to place their own counter-proposals before the country.

Differences within the party were smoothed over, and a manifesto, drawn up by Deak, gave statesmanlike expression to the aims of the national leaders.

Embracing every reform included in the policy of the Government, it added to them others which the Government had not ventured to face, and gave to the whole the character of a vindication of its own rights by the nation, in contrast to a scheme of administrative reform worked out by the officers of the Crown. Thus while it enforced the taxation of the n.o.bles, it claimed for the Diet the right of control over every branch of the national expenditure. It demanded increased liberty for the Press, and an unfettered right of political a.s.sociation; and finally, while doing homage to the unity of the Crown, it required that the Government of Hungary should be one in direct accord with the national representation in the Diet, and that the habitual effort of the Court of Vienna to place this kingdom on the same footing as the Emperor's non-const.i.tutional provinces should be abandoned. With the rival programmes of the Government and the Opposition before it, the country proceeded to the elections of 1847. Hopefulness and enthusiasm abounded on every side; and at the close of the year the Diet a.s.sembled from which so great a work was expected, and which was destined within so short a time to witness, in storm and revolution, the pa.s.sing away of the ancient order of Hungarian life.

[The Rural System of Hungary.]

The directly const.i.tutional problems with which the Diet of Presburg had to deal were peculiar to Hungary itself, and did not exist in the other parts of the Austrian Empire. There were, however, social problems which were not less urgently forcing themselves upon public attention alike in Hungary and in those provinces which enjoyed no const.i.tutional rights. The chief of these was the condition of the peasant-population. In the greater part of the Austrian dominions, though serf.a.ge had long been abolished, society was still based upon the manorial system. The peasant held his land subject to the obligation of labouring on his lord's domain for a certain number of days in the year, and of rendering him other customary services: the manor-court, though checked by the neighbourhood of crown-officers, retained its jurisdiction, and its agents frequently performed duties of police. Hence the proposed extinction of the so-called feudal tie, and the conversion of the semi-dependent cultivator into a freeholder bound only to the payment of a fixed money-charge, or rendered free of all obligation by the surrender of a part of his holding, involved in many districts the inst.i.tution of new public authorities and a general reorganisation of the minor local powers. From this task the Austrian Government had shrunk in mere lethargy, even when, as in 1835, proposals for change had come from the landowners themselves. The work begun by Maria Theresa and Joseph remained untouched, though thirty years of peace had given abundant opportunity for its completion, and the legislation of Hardenberg in 1810 afforded precedents covering at least part of the field.

[Insurrection in Galicia, Feb., 1846.]

[Rural Edict, Dec., 1845.]

At length events occurred which roused the drowsiest heads in Vienna from their slumbers. The party of action among the Polish refugees at Paris had determined to strike another blow for the independence of their country.

Instead, however, of repeating the insurrection of Warsaw, it was arranged that the revolt should commence in Prussian and Austrian Poland, and the beginning of the year 1846 was fixed for the uprising. In Prussia the Government crushed the conspirators before a blow could be struck. In Austria, though ample warning was given, the precautions taken were insufficient. General Collin occupied the Free City of Cracow, where the revolutionary committee had its headquarters; but the troops under his command were so weak that he was soon compelled to retreat, and to await the arrival of reinforcements. Meanwhile the landowners in the district of Tarnow in northern Galicia raised the standard of insurrection, and sought to arm the country. The Ruthenian peasantry, however, among whom they lived, owed all that was tolerable in their condition to the protection of the Austrian crown-officers, and detested the memory of an independent Poland. Instead of following their lords into the field, they gave information of their movements, and asked instructions from the nearest Austrian authorities. They were bidden to seize upon any persons who instigated them to rebellion, and to bring them into the towns. A war of the peasants against the n.o.bles forthwith broke out. Murder, pillage, and incendiary fires brought both the Polish insurrection and its leaders to a miserable end. The Polish n.o.bles, unwilling to acknowledge the humiliating truth that their own peasants were their bitterest enemies, charged the Austrian Government with having set a price on their heads, and with having instigated the peasants to a communistic revolt. Metternich, disgraced by the spectacle of a Jacquerie raging apparently under his own auspices, insisted, in a circular to the European Courts, that the attack of the peasantry upon the n.o.bles had been purely spontaneous, and occasioned by attempts to press certain villagers into the ranks of the rebellion by brute force. But whatever may have been the measure of responsibility incurred by the agents of the Government, an agrarian revolution was undoubtedly in full course in Galicia, and its effects were soon felt in the rest of the Austrian monarchy. The Arcadian contentment of the rural population, which had been the boast, and in some degree the real strength, of Austria, was at an end. Conscious that the problem which it had so long evaded must at length be faced, the Government of Vienna prepared to deal with the conditions of land-tenure by legislation extending over the whole of the Empire. But the courage which was necessary for an adequate solution of the difficulty nowhere existed within the official world, and the Edict which conveyed the last words of the Imperial Government on this vital question contained nothing more than a series of provisions for facilitating voluntary settlements between the peasants and their lords. In the quality of this enactment the Court of Vienna gave the measure of its own weakness. The opportunity of breaking with traditions of impotence had presented itself and had been lost. Revolution was at the gates; and in the unsatisfied claim of the rural population the Government had handed over to its adversaries a weapon of the greatest power. [408]

[Vienna.]

In the purely German provinces of Austria there lingered whatever of the spirit of tranquillity was still to be found within the Empire. This, however, was not the case in the districts into which the influence of the capital extended. Vienna had of late grown out of its old careless spirit.

The home in past years of a population notoriously pleasure-loving, good-humoured, and indifferent to public affairs, it had now taken something of a more serious character. The death of the Emperor Francis, who to the last generation of Viennese had been as fixed a part of the order of things as the river Danube, was not unconnected with this change in the public tone. So long as the old Emperor lived, all thought that was given to political affairs was energy thrown away. By his death not only had the State lost an ultimate controlling power, if dull, yet practised and tenacious, but this loss was palpable to all the world. The void stood bare and unrelieved before the public eye. The notorious imbecility of the Emperor Ferdinand, the barren and antiquated formalism of Metternich and of that entire system which seemed to be incorporated in him, made Government an object of general satire, and in some quarters of rankling contempt. In proportion as the culture and intelligence of the capital exceeded that of other towns, so much the more galling was the pressure of that part of the general system of tutelage which was especially directed against the independence of the mind. The censorship was exercised with grotesque stupidity. It was still the aim of Government to isolate Austria from the ideas and the speculation of other lands, and to shape the intellectual world of the Emperor's subjects into that precise form which tradition prescribed as suitable for the members of a well-regulated State. In poetry, the works of Lord Byron were excluded from circulation, where custom-house officers and market-inspectors chose to enforce the law; in history and political literature, the leading writers of modern times lay under the same ban. Native production was much more effectively controlled.

Whoever wrote in a newspaper, or lectured at a University, or published a work of imagination, was expected to deliver himself of something agreeable to the const.i.tuted authorities, or was reduced to silence. Far as Vienna fell short of Northern Germany in intellectual activity, the humiliation inflicted on its best elements by this life-destroying surveillance was keenly felt and bitterly resented. More perhaps by its senile warfare against mental freedom than by any acts of direct political repression, the Government ranged against itself the almost unanimous opinion of the educated cla.s.ses. Its hold on the affection of the capital was gone. Still quiescent, but ready to unite against the Government when opportunity should arrive, there stood, in addition to the unorganised ma.s.s of the middle ranks, certain political a.s.sociations and students' societies, a vigorous Jewish element, and the usual contingent furnished by poverty and discontent in every great city from among the labouring population.

Military force sufficient to keep the capital in subjection was not wanting; but the foresight and the vigour necessary to cope with the first onset of revolution were nowhere to be found among the holders of power.

[Prussia.]

[Frederick William IV., 1840.]

At Berlin the solid order of Prussian absolutism already shook to its foundation. With King Frederick William III., whose long reign ended in 1840, there departed the half-filial, half-spiritless acquiescence of the nation in the denial of the liberties which had been so solemnly promised to it at the epoch of Napoleon's fall. The new Sovereign, Frederick William IV., ascended the throne amid high national hopes. The very contrast which his warm, exuberant nature offered to the silent, reserved disposition of his father impressed the public for awhile in his favour. In the more shining personal qualities he far excelled all his immediate kindred. His artistic and literary sympathies, his apt.i.tude of mind and readiness of speech, appeared to mark the man of a new age, and encouraged the belief that, in spite of the mediaeval dreams and reactionary theories to which, as prince, he had surrendered himself, he would, as King, appreciate the needs of the time, and give to Prussia the free inst.i.tutions which the nation demanded. The first acts of the new reign were generously conceived.

Political offenders were freely pardoned. Men who had suffered for their opinions were restored to their posts in the Universities and the public service, or selected for promotion. But when the King approached the const.i.tutional question, his utterances were unsatisfactory. Though undoubtedly in favour of some reform, he gave no sanction to the idea of a really national representation, but seemed rather to seek occasions to condemn it. Other omens of ill import were not wanting. Allying his Government with a narrow school of theologians, the King offended men of independent mind, and transgressed against the best traditions of Prussian administration. The prestige of the new reign was soon exhausted. Those who had believed Frederick William to be a man of genius now denounced him as a vaporous, inflated dilettante; his enthusiasm was seen to indicate nothing in particular; his sonorous commonplaces fell flat on second delivery. Not only in his own kingdom, but in the minor German States, which looked to Prussia as the future leader of a free Germany, the opinion rapidly gained ground that Frederick William IV. was to be numbered among the enemies rather than the friends of the good cause.

[United Diet convoked at Berlin, Feb. 3, 1847.]