of the spirit of the “Holy Alliance” against what Metternich always termed “the Revolution”—(with a capital R) by which he meant the attempts of peoples to free themselves from despotism and to determine, in President Wilson’s phrase, “their own way of life and obedience.” However reprehensible and reactionary the Russian action in assisting Francis Joseph to crush his revolted Magyar subjects may seem to us, we must remember that, from the point of view of the Hapsburg dynasty, it must have seemed, and should have seemed, a knightly act worthy of gratitude and requital. General Gürgei and the bulk of the Magyar forces surrendered to the Russians, who stipulated that the Magyar generals should be treated as prisoners of war. The Austrians broke that stipulation, and hanged thirteen of them at Arad. Thus they and their Emperor earned for a generation the fierce hatred of the Magyars. What gratitude did Francis Joseph show to Russia for her help? Prince Schwarzenberg, the Austrian statesman, declared in advance that Austrian ingratitude would astonish the world. He might have added, in the bitter but veracious words of another Austrian, that “the history of the House of Hapsburg is the history of ingratitude.”
Why, indeed, should the Hapsburgs be grateful? Are their subjects not their personal property? Are they not divinely-appointed to hold sway over the earth? Whoever serves and helps them does but his plain duty and should rejoice in the consciousness of rightful service well done.
When, five years later, Russia became involved in the Crimean War, not only did Austria lend her no help but, after a period of vacillation, actually joined England, France, and Sardinia against Russia. Similarly, when in 1867 Francis Joseph finally came to terms with the Magyars after the defeat of Sadowa, he handed over to the tender mercies of the Magyars, the Roumanes, Slovaks and Croats who had stood by him in his hour of trouble. Thus the Magyars were able to fling at the non-Magyars and the Croats the taunt, “You have received for loyalty the same recompense as we received for revolt!”
But I am anticipating. When Magyar resistance had been broken in Hungary, order restored in Austria, and the Constitution granted in 1848 had been revoked, the forces of reaction carried every thing before them. Under their influence the Emperor concluded an agreement or concordat with Rome, which was promulgated as a “constitutional” law on August 18, 1855, the Emperor’s 25th birthday. It was hailed by the official press as “the true constitution of Austria, and much better than any other constitution.” In fact, it was an abject capitulation of the State to the Church. In commenting upon it The Times wrote that “a crown worn under such conditions is not worth the metal of which it is made.” Not noly did it place education in all its forms under priestly control, but it abolished the placetum Regium, or the right of the Sovereign to give or withhold his assent to the appointment of bishops—a right which even the fanatical Ferdinand had maintained and which his successors had frequently exercised. The practice of the Hapsburgs had always been to kick, cuff and trample upon the Church when it suited their purposes, and to fawn upon her when they needed help, but without sacrificing essential Hapsburg rights. In the eyes of the Emperor Francis Joseph the real object of the concordat was to turn the clergy into the spiritual constabulary of the state, a constabulary more effective and less discredited than the “religious police” of Joseph II., because it would work with apparent freedom in the interest of religion and of the Church. Yet though the Concordat was declared to be “perpetual”, to be founded upon the “imprescriptible rights proceeding from the divine origin of the Church”; and though it was promulgated as a constitutional law, Francis Joseph discarded it, as he had discarded the various civil constitutions of 1848–49, as soon as he believed that dynastic interests required a change. Not even the “sacred and imprescriptible rights” of the Church, however solemnly and perpetually recognized, were proof against Hapsburg bad faith and ingratitude, or, if you prefer against the exalted opportunism of the “All-Highest Arch-House”.
Thus in 1867, when it became necessary to grant another civil Constitution to Austria and to appoint a Liberal Ministry, Francis Joseph curtly sent a deputation of protesting bishops about their business, and in the next four years sanctioned a series of anti-Clerical laws that culminated in the abrogation of the Concordat itself on the specious pretext that—after the proclamation of the dogma of Papal infallibility by the Vatican Council in 1870—an infallible Pope could no longer be bound by a contract, and must therefore be released from it! Thus in 1897, when the successors of these German Liberals, with the help of North-German Protestants and Pangermans, started the Los von Rom (Away from Rome) movement, which was, in its essence, antiHapsburg, Francis Joseph smiled again on the Church, and allowed his nephew and presumptive successor to become president of Clerical associations, of which the professed object was to work for the restoration of the temporal power of the Pope. Thus in 1903, on the death of Pope Leo XIII., Francis Joseph vetoed the election of Cardinal Rampolla to the Papacy, though the election of a Pope by the College of Cardinals in conclave is believed to be guided by Divine inspiration, and though the veto was exercised, not on spiritual grounds, but for the very mundane reason that Cardinal Rampolla had been hostile to the Triple Alliance, and was therefore obnoxious to Austria and Germany. The most singular feature of the veto was that the Austrian Cardinal Puzyna, who pronounced it in the name of the Emperor, was quite unconscious that he was sinning against the Holy Ghost.
In fact, the Austrian clergy is one of the least religious bodies of ecclesiastics in the world, just as the Austrian people, while outwardly very observ-
