25 Skladkovsky (popularly known as ‘the honest Czech’) had been condemned to death for complicity in the ‘conspiracy’ of May 1849, and although reprieved, had spent several year? in prison.
26 During the negotiations with Badeni in 1896 this same Gregr had wanted to make his Party’s consent to the agreement conditional on recognition by the Government of Bohemian State Rights (Suttner, op. cit., I. 138).
27 The conflict between the two parties is described by Denis, op. cit., II. 562 ff.
28 At the Crown Council referred to above, Francis Joseph was most insistent that if the Czechs came in, the Great Landowners must be represented ‘for without them, the Czechs would be no advantage to the Conservative side in the Reichsrat’. Taaffe agreed. Even Rieger would be dangerous unless yoked to the Feudalists, and it would be exceedingly dangerous if the Young Czechs came in alone.
29 The figures were complicated, especially by the disintegration of the Constitutional Great Landlords. The main strength of the Right lay in three big groups: the Polish Club (which included five Ruthenes) with 57 Deputies; the Party of the Right, or Hohenwart Club (German Clericals, the Bohemian Feudalists and some Slovenes, Croats and Roumanians) also with 57; and the Czechs, now comprising all the Czechs, including those of Moravia, with 54. The backbone of the Left consisted of the 91 ‘Liberals’ (this figure includes 20 former Constitutional Landowners), 54 Progressives, 8 Styrian ‘Progressives’, 5 ‘Viennese Democrats’ and 2 German Nationalists. The remainder, the Coronini Club, the Italians and some non-Party Deputies, divided their votes. The Right was generally reckoned to have 179 members and the Left, 174.
30 Stremayr (Cults and Education, and Justice), Horst (Defence), Korb-Weidenheim (Commerce), Baron von Chertek (Finance). The other members of the Cabinet were Ziemialkowski (for the Poles), Prazak (for the Czechs) and Count Julius Falkenhayn (Agriculture).
31 See Plener, Erinnerungen, II. 167 ff.
32 When, after Taaffe’s resignation, the question arose of appointing a Coalition Ministry, and Francis Joseph hesitated, someone said to him that Taaffe’s regime, too, had been a coalition, Francis Joseph replied, ‘It was not a Parliamentary coalition, but an Emperor’s Ministry’ (Corti, Der Alte Kaiser, p. 180).
33 See on this Redlich, Franz Joseph, p. 371. He was also a favourite of the Archduke Albrecht’s (Charmatz, Lebensbilder, p. 151). Taaffe presided over no less than twenty-two Ministries.
34 For the educational legislation of the period, see below, p. 621.
35 The phrase, often attributed to Taaffe himself, was in fact coined by Herbst.
36 Unless we count the decennial renewal of the Compromise, which this time (1889) went through without substantial changes.
37 The reform increased the number of voters in the rural communes by 34% and in the urban, by 26%.
38 The German Club was itself composed of three fractions: the Deutscher Klub (24); the Deutschnationale Vereinigung (18); and the Verband der Deutschnationalen (6).
39 Excluding that of the Italian Lands lost to the Monarchy in 1859 and 1866.
40 This attitude, general before 1848, now became almost a fixation. In 1904, the capita deposited with savings-banks and building societies was 5,922 million kronen, while only 1,818 million kronen was in bills of exchange. 250 million kronen were on deposit with the banks, and 5,000 million kronen in savings-banks, 59·96 of this being invested in mortgages.
41 The number of joint stock companies in Austria in 1895 (299) was only seven higher than in 1878.
42 Benedikt, op. cit., p. 125, even attributes the social legislation of the Taaffe period to a wish ‘to hinder the development of industry, the detrimental effects of which, in the form of flight from the land and higher agricultural wages, the big landlords were feeling’.
43 This figure, moreover, is almost certainly too low, for the Austrian statistics, like the Hungarian, contained a rubric for ‘day labourers in various occupations’, and many of these were certainly employed in agriculture.
44 In 1890 59% of all industrial enterprises in Cis-Leithania, 65% of their labour force and 59% of industrial production were concentrated in the Bohemian Lands. Since 1848 industrial production in these Lands had risen from 46% to 59% of the total for Cis-Leithania, while the share of the Alpine Lands had sunk from 40% to 33% and that of the other Lands from 14% to 8% (M.K.P., III. 277).
45 The Archduchess died on 5 May 1872, Rauscher, on 24 November 1875.
46 It was the decision taken by the Old Czechs in 1868 to support a proposal by Prince Alois Liechtenstein to reduce the term of school years to six (five days in the week) that was largely responsible for the downfall of their Party in the 1891 elections.
47 It is fair to point out that the eight-years schooling was almost universally unpopular among the peasants themselves.
48 Tiefen, op. cit., quotes on p. 23 figures showing that in 1902 the income of the Church in Bohemia was 15·2 million kronen, of which it spent only 8·96 and re-invested 6·26.
49 Tiefen, op. cit., p. 63.
50 See above, p. 466.
51 At the German-Austrian Conference of 1872, when the Prussian agriculturalists were complaining of labour shortage, it was stated that the Austrian landlords were not suffering from this, because they had mechanized their production in time. Seasonal labour was always available from North Hungary and Galicia (Brügel, Gesch., II. 177).
52 Outside them, only 9,354 ha. were under sugar-beet in Silesia and 575 ha. in Lower Austria. 212 of the 216 refineries were in Bohemia and Moravia.
53 Bignon, La Grande Propriété en Bohème (1886), cit. Denis, p. 330.
54 Kolmer, III. p. 323.
55 I take these and the following figures from Tiefen, op. cit., p. 190. Tiefen is quoting the statistics published in the Statistisches Monatsschrift, 1900–1, which is unfortunately not available to me.
56 A pun on the two meanings of the word ‘Schimmel’: mildew, and a white horse.
57 For the impressions of one Briton who did know what this service was like, sec Steed, op. cit., pp. 73–90.
58 Horsetzky, op. cit., p. 716.
59 See the article by A. Braf in L. U. F., II. I. pp.
60 The usual rate charged by the Rustical Bank of Gablic, a Jewish enterprise which operated from 1868 to 1884, and to which one Galician peasant in every twenty was indebted, was 40%; and the bank was much less exacting than the village money-lender. At an inquiry into peasant conditions in 1882, the authorities in Galicia and the Bukovina gave as the causes for the peasant distress, ‘over-population, religious, moral and intellectual degradation, frivolity, extravagance, lack of diligence and thrift, shortage of industry in the Land, competition, the many holidays and market-days, the high cost of legal procedure, and above all, the high taxes and dues’ (Kolmer, III. 322).
61 For further details on peasant indebtedness see the article by M. Ertl in L. U. F., I. 512 ff.
62 This was regular among Slavs, among those of the South even more than those of the North. It was not uncommon for a girl to be left unmarried all her life, although she had a fiancé who wanted her, because her parents could not raise the money to marry her in the style on which they insisted.
63 Cf. Drage, op. cit., p. 65.
64 Kolmer, IV. 293.
65 Figures from Tiefen, op. cit., pp. 31, 33.
66 Op. cit., p. 64.
67 Consolidation had not been carried out in Cis-Leithania in connection with the land reform (see above, p. 463). The shape of the plots sometimes perpetuated extraordinary relics of earlier conditions. Schiff (op. cit., I/II. p. 223) writes that in some places, ‘plots 4 km. long and only 7 metres wide were no rarity’. The introduction of the free market for land aggravated the Streusiedling, since a plot coming on the market might be miles away from the purchaser’s other holding. In 1916, 83% of the holdings in the Tirol were dispersed, and in Dalmatia, 100%.
68 Drage, loc. cit.
69 In my book, The Social Revolution in Austria, published
as long ago as 1926, I quoted Peter Rosegger’s famous novel, Jakob der Letze, for a picture of this gradual disappearance of a Styrian mountain parish. I make bold, even at this date, to refer the reader interested in the peasant question in Austria to chapter 7 of my book. It relates, indeed, only to the Alpine Lands which formed the later Austrian Republic. Still more heartily do I recommend Rosegger’s classic to any reader.
70 Opinion on the indivisible Bauernhof seems always to have been divided. Although the farms were, by custom, always assessed very low for the purpose, the son inheriting the Hof often found the portioning off of his co-heirs a millstone round his neck. When an inquiry into the subject was instituted in 1882, nineteen local authorities favoured re-imposition of the indivisibility, sixteen were against, and ten refused to commit themselves (Kolmer, III. 322). For a detailed account of this question, by a strong partisan of the undivided Bauernhof, see the article by Dr Ertl in L. U. F., I. 468 ff. The 1889 Law in any case applied only to medium-sized farms.
71 Drage, op. cit., p. 168. Both Tiefen, pp. 44, 51–5, and Drage, pp. 66 ff., give some wage figures, but these vary so much and are so complicated by payments in kind and other considerations, that it seems useless to reproduce them.
72 Id., p. 66.
73 When J. Howard, a travelling Englishman, made a tour of investigation, he was told in Galicia that the labourers were ‘mostly small peasants with their own houses. They often had a little land of their own, or rented plots from the landlord.’ (J. Howard, Continental Farming and Peasantry, London, 1870, p. 134.) In Bohemia, imported gang labour was used. Howard’s is another hair-raising description of the miserable conditions under which Austrian farm labourers worked. It is true that they were not noticeably worse than those observed by him in France and Belgium.
74 On this see International Migrations (National Bureau of Economic Research), vols. 14 (1929), pp. 588–97, and 18 (1931), pp. 390–411. The former volume gives the statistics, the latter, ‘interpretations’, by Dr Klezel.
75 The total emigration had only occasionally reached a figure of 10,000 in a single year; more often it was only 2–3,000. The Land with the largest figure was regularly Bohemia, whence a fair number of Czechs went to Russia, where they had been promised land (Drage writes, p. 73, that most of these returned, having found the promises illusory, but there were still some Czech colonies in Volhynia when it passed to Poland after 1918). Another trickle went from Bohemia to the Klondyke in the years of the gold rush. Most of these were presumably German miners.
76 300,000 Jews emigrated from the Monarchy to the U.S.A. and England between 1881 and 1908 (Steed, p. 149). Others, of course, went to Germany and other countries. Many of them probably never figured in the emigration statistics.
77 The statistics given by the National Bureau are not broken down by Lands after 1884, but in 1901 it was stated in the Reichsrat that in the decade 1891–1900, 327,491 emigrants had left Galicia. The total recorded Austrian figure for those years was about 435,000.
78 In March 1870 the Viennese bakers’ assistants wrote to their colleagues in Prague warning parents and guardians not to send their children to Vienna to learn baking. ‘These boys are bought on the spot for 50 kreuzer (1/8d.) like cattle. The drudgery and over-work turn them simply into idiot cripples; the Viennese master-bakers have no consciences. So, too, with the apprentices; let them not think that life in Vienna is milk and honey. They are treated like dogs for a weekly wage of one gulden 50 kreuzer (3s.) and a single meal a day, which is worse than a dog’s’ (Brügel, Geschichte, I. 320). There are frequent references in the literature of the time to the ‘slave-market’ where children from the provinces, especially Prague, were brought by their parents to be sold to Viennese masters.
79 In 1862 the workers asked for permission to form an educational association, but permission was refused. The official concerned wrote that ‘experience in Germany, particularly Prussia, has shown that such movements, however they begin, tend to flow over into subversive politics, and it seems likely that the same thing would happen in Austria’.
80 Another dictum of his was: ‘General franchise is never right for Austria, either now or later.’
81 See L. Brügel, Gesetzgebung, pp. 117 ff.
82 The Bill was introduced the day after the demonstration. It became law on 7 April 1870.
83 The excuse given was that they had attended the Social Democrat Conference in Eisenach, and had adopted its programme.
84 Brügel, op. cit., pp. 100 ff.
85 An inquiry held in Vienna in 1872 showed that it was common for apprentices, etc., to be required to sleep two and three in a bed. The beds were, moreover, arranged in tiers of bunks and the rooms grossly filthy and overcrowded. A memorandum from the workers, prepared for the Berlin Conference, said that the average life of a factory worker was only thirty-three years.
86 The Social Democrat movement, such as it was, now moved its headquarters to Graz.
87 See below, pp. 653 ff.
88 In a famous passage, Vogelsang compared the system, not to its advantage, with a chariot of Juggernaut, writing that until ‘the dark superstition of its worship’ had been eradicated and overthrown by ‘a serious, purposeful, concentric attack’, detailed and individual remedies were useless.
89 For a full account of these, see Brügel, op. cit., pp. 151 ff.
90 The first of these were appointed as early as 1883.
91 See on this point, Drage, op. cit., pp. 102 ff.
92 As well as the factory-owners, most of the pedlars and street traders were Jewish.
93 See below, p. 655.
94 Good brief surveys, with bibliographies, may be found in Zöllner, op. cit., pp. 458 ff., and M.K.P., III. 291 ff.
95 H. Benedikt, cit. Hantsch, Geschichte, II. 454.
96 He also had certain rather mysterious connections with some Hungarian circles, who regarded him as their friend and even dreamed of having him crowned ‘junior King’ in his father’s life-time; but one may strongly doubt whether anything would ever have come of these plans.
97 This increasing definition and unambiguity of national feeling in individuals was an interesting phenomenon of the period. Charmatz, in his Politisches Denken in Oesterreich, p.59, quotes striking cases from earlier years of men who described themselves indifferently (or differently at different dates) as Poles or Ruthenes, Germans or Czechs, etc. He rightly points out the importance of this phenomenon of convertibility of national feeling, for while it existed, any nation could hope that if it gained territorial possession of some area, it would be able to convert to membership of itself at least the majority of the local population. This hope still existed in the Taaffe era and beyond it, but the justification for it was vanishing.
98 Charmatz, op. cit., p. 70 (um Oesterreich, nicht gegen Oesterreich).
99 Jászi, op. cit., p. 387, rightly says that the Czechs’ flirtations with Pan-Slavism ‘did not signify a possible or serious irredentist movement, but rather a tactical and also a sentimental position’.
100 In the Tirol, the only other Crownland containing a highly developed bourgeoisie of two nationalities, the Italians and Germans there led such separate lives as hardly to clash.
101 This word is not meant to denote any order of priorities. The Deutscher Schulverein, which covered all Austria, was founded in 1880, the same year as the Matice, and the Turnverband ante-dated the Sokol.
102 One of these organizations deserves special mention: the so-called Chabrus, organized before the 1872 elections by the Germanophile Great Landed proprietors, operating through the newly founded Crédit Foncier and other banks, to buy up landtäfliche estates which entitled their owners to votes in the Landlords’ Curia. The Czechs replied in the same way, through the Živnostenska Banka. Sometimes a purchase was real, sometimes a landlord would distribute his estate by sales on paper to his bailiffs, gamekeepers, etc., who then voted as Great Landlords. See Münch, Böhmische Tragödie, p. 370.
103 Even the prop
osed Czech language law of 1871, while demanding the same equality for the two languages in Bohemia, had not based its claim on the Majestätsbrief: the continued validity of that document was asserted only later, and the Germans were astounded as well as scandalized when, on 13 December 1898, the Supreme Court pronounced it to be still valid.
104 The law of 1869 enacted that an elementary school must be provided where at least forty children of school age (over a five-years average) were to be found within a radius of four km.
105 The Czech explanation for this is that the Germans were ‘decadent’, the Czechs, ‘more virile’. Another way of putting it is that the Czechs were content to accept standards of living against which the Germans revolted, preferring to emigrate, chiefly to Vienna (where there was a very big German-Bohemian colony), but also to the Alpine Lands. It is true that when the rural congestion in the Czech areas grew intolerable, many Czechs also emigrated to Vienna, where there were 69,000 of them (5·5% of the total population) in 1890. They were chiefly domestic servants, tailors or small shopkeepers.
106 Denis, p. 570, seems to have got his figures wrong here. See the careful calculations in Waber, pp. 43 ff., 118. In 1846–51, when the Jews were listed separately, the Germans had constituted 38·6% of the population, and the Czechs, 59·8. The figures for 1857 were 37·0 and 61·2. In 1881, when account was taken only of language, they were 37·2 and 62·8: the Germans’ increase 1846–80 had been 19·91% and that of the Czechs, 31·71%. But from 1880 to 1910 the rates of increase of the two peoples differed little (Germans, 20·13, Czechs, 22·24) and their proportionate shares of the population were:
Germans Czechs
1880 37·17 62·79
1890 37·20 62·23
1900 37·23 62·67
1910 36·76 63·19
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 108