“It will endure Metternich and me,” said the late Emperor Franz. 
If Metternich does not wish to give his emperor the lie, he had better 
die as soon as possible. 

This chequered Austrian monarchy, scraped together by theft and 
by inheritance, this organised jumble of ten languages and nations, 
this planless mish-mash of contradictory customs and laws, is at last 
beginning to disintegrate. 

Honest German citizens have for years been fervent admirers of 
the director of this creaking state machine, the cowardly swindler 
and assassin—Metternich. Talleyrand, Louis Philippe and Metter- 
nich, three most mediocre minds and hence most suitable for our 
mediocre times, are regarded by German citizens as three gods who 
for thirty years have manipulated world history as if it were a puppet 
show. Going by his own daily experience, the honest citizen regards 
history as a kind of plot hatched in a tavern or as feminine gossip on 
a somewhat larger scale. 

Certainly, there is no country over which the tidal wave of 
revolution, the triple Napoleonic invasions 285 passed away so 
completely without trace as Austria. Certainly, there is no country 
where feudalism, patriarchalism and faint-hearted philistinism 
defended by the paternal rod, have been maintained so immaculate- 
ly or harmoniously as in Austria. But is it Metternich’s fault? 

On what does the might, the tenacity, the stability, of the House of 
Austria rest? 

When Italy, France, England, Belgium, North and West Germany, 
one after another extricated themselves from feudal barbarism 
during the latter half of the Middle Ages, when industry was 

developing, trade expanding, the towns thriving and the burghers 
acquired political importance, one part of Germany lagged behind 
West European development. Bourgeois civilisation followed the sea 
coasts and the course of the big rivers. The inland, especially the 
barren and impassable mountainous regions, remained the seat of 
barbarism and of feudalism. This barbarism was especially concen- 
trated in the South German and South Slav inland areas. Protected 
by the Alps from Italian civilisation and by the mountains of 
Bohemia and Moravia from that of North Germany, these inland 
countries had the additional good fortune of being the basin of the 
only reactionary river in Europe. The Danube, far from linking 
them with civilisation, brought them into contact with a much 
more vigorous barbarism. 

When the great monarchies developed in Western Europe in the 
wake of bourgeois civilisation, the inland countries of the Upper 
Danube likewise had to unite in a great monarchy. This was required 
if only for the needs of defence. Here, in the centre of Europe, the 
barbarians of all tongues and of all nations associated under the 
sceptre of the House of Hapsburg. Here they found in Hungary a 
mainstay of solid barbarism. 

The Danube, the Alps, the rocky breastworks of Bohemia—these 
are the bases for the existence of Austrian barbarism and of the 
Austrian monarchy. 

The House of Hapsburg supported the burghers against the 
aristocracy and the towns against the princes because this was the 
only condition on which a great monarchy was possible. When, later 
on, it again supported the petty bourgeoisie, this was because the 
petty bourgeoisie in the rest of Europe had become reactionary 
themselves with regard to the big bourgeoisie. On both occasions it 
supported the petty bourgeois for decidedly reactionary purposes. 
But now this method has miscarried. 

The House of Austria was thus from the first the representative of 
barbarism, of reactionary stability in Europe. Its power rested on the 
foolishness of the patriarchalism entrenched behind the impassable 
mountains, on the inaccessible brutality of barbarism. A dozen 
nations whose customs, character, and institutions were flagrantly 
opposed to one another clung together on the strength of their 
common dislike for civilisation. 

Hence the House of Austria was invincible as long as the barbarous 
character of its subjects remained untouched. Hence it was 
threatened by only one danger—the penetration of bourgeois 
civilisation. 

But this sole danger was not to be averted. Bourgeois civilisation 

could be warded off for a time, it could be temporarily adapted and 
subordinated to Austrian barbarism. But it was bound to overcome 
feudal barbarism sooner or later, and shatter the only link which had 
held the most variegated provinces together. 

This explains Austria’s passive, hesitant, cowardly, sordid and 
underhand policy. Austria can no longer act, as before, in an openly 
brutal, thoroughly barbarous way because it must make concessions 
to civilisation every year, and because its own subjects become less 
reliable every year. Every decisive step would lead to a change at 
home or in the neighbouring countries, every change would mean a 
breach in the dam behind which Austria laboriously protects itself 
against the rising tides of modern civilisation. The first victim of any 
change would be the House of Austria itself which stands or falls 
with barbarism. Although Austria was still able to disperse the 
Piedmontese, Neapolitan and Romagnese rebels with cannon fire in 
1823 and 1831, it was forced to set in motion a still undeveloped 
revolutionary element—the peasantry—in 1846 in Galicia; it had 
to stop the advance of its troops near Ferrara in 1847 and resort 
to conspiracy in Rome.?8 Counter-revolutionary Austria uses 
revolutionary means—this is the surest sign that its end 1s ap- 
proaching. 

Once the Italian insurrections of 1831, and the Polish revolution 
of 1830 had been suppressed and the French bourgeois had given 
guarantees of good behaviour, Emperor Franz could go to his grave 
in peace; the times seemed miserable enough to endure even his 
feeble-minded offspring.’ 

As yet the realm of the crowned idiot was still safe from 
revolutions. But who could ensure it against the causes of revolu- 
tions? 

As long as industry remained domestic industry, as jong as every 
peasant family or at least every village produced its own industrial 
products, without putting much on the market, industry itself 
remained feudal and excellently suited to Austrian barbarism. As 
long as it remained mere manufactory, rural industry, few products 
of the inland countries were made available for export and foreign 
trade was minimal, industry existed in a few districts only and was 
easily adaptable to the Austrian status quo. If manufacture could 
only produce relatively few big bourgeois even in England and 
France, then it could only produce a modest middle class in 
thinly-populated and remote Austria, and even this only here and 
there. As long as hand labour existed, Austria was safe. 

But machinery was invented and machines ruined hand labour. 
The prices of industrial products fell so swiftly and so low that first 
of all manufacture and then, gradually, the old feudal domestic 
industry went under. 

Austria fortified itself against the machines by a consistent system 
of prohibitive tariffs. But in vain, it was precisely the system of 
prohibitive tariffs which was responsible for bringing machinery into 
Austria. Bohemia used machinery in the cotton industry; Lombardy 
for silk spinning; Vienna even started to produce machinery. 

The results were quick to follow. The workers in manufacture 
became destitute. The entire population of the manufacturing 
districts was torn out of its hereditary mode of life. The former 
philistines grew into big bourgeois and lorded it over hundreds of 
workers just as their princely and aristocratic neighbours lorded it 
over hundreds of peasant serfs. Through the collapse of the old type 
of industry, these peasant serfs lost their old occupations and 
acquired new needs as a result of the new industry. It was no longer 
possible to carry on feudal agriculture alongside modern industry. 
The abolition of corvée became a necessity. The feudal position of 
the peasants in relation to the landowners became untenable. The 
towns became thriving. The guilds were oppressive for the 
consumers, useless for those who belonged to them and intolerable 
for those engaged in industry. Competition had to be permitted 
surreptitiously. The position of all classes in society was radically 
changed. The old classes withdrew more and more into the 
background before the two new classes, the bourgeoisie and the 
proletariat. Agriculture declined in importance compared with 
industry, the countryside gave way to the towns. 

Such were the consequences of machinery in some areas of 
Austria, especially in Bohemia and Lombardy. They gave rise to a 
reaction which affected the entire monarchy to a greater or lesser 
degree; everywhere they undermined the old barbarism, and with it 
the foundations of the House of Austria. 

While in Romagna in 1831 the battered Austrian soldiers replied 
to cries of Viva l’Italia with grape-shot, in England the first railways 
were built. Like machinery, railways immediately became a necessity 
for all European countries. Austria had to have them, willy-nilly. In 
order not to give increased power to the already growing bourgeoi- 
sie, the Government built them itself; but it went from Scylla to 
Charybdis. It prevented the establishment of powerful bourgeois 
joint stock companies only by borrowing from the same bourgeois 
the money to build the railways, by putting itself in pawn to 
Rothschild, Arnstein, Eskeles, Sina, etc. 

Still less did the House of Austria escape the effects of the railways. 

The mountain ranges which separated the Austrian monarchy 
from the outside world, Bohemia from Moravia and Austria, Austria 
from Styria, Styria from Illyria, Illyria from Lombardy, fell before 
the railways. The granite walls behind which each province had 
maintained a separate nationality and a limited local existence, 
ceased to be a barrier. All of a sudden the products of large-scale 
industry, of machinery, forced their way, almost free of transport 
costs, into the most remote corners of the monarchy, destroyed the 
old hand labour and shattered the feudal barbarism. Trade between 
the provinces, and with the civilised outside world, acquired an 
unheard-of importance. The Danube, flowing towards the backward 
regions, ceased to be the main artery of the Empire; the Alps and the 
Bohemian forests no longer exist; the new artery now passes from 
Trieste to Hamburg, Ostend and Le Havre, far beyond the frontiers 
of the Empire, through the mountain ranges to the remote coasts of 
the North Sea and the ocean. Participation in the general interests of 
the State, in what was happening in the outside world became a 
necessity. The local barbarism began to disappear, particular 
interests began to diverge here, to merge there. Nationalities 
separated in one place to link up somewhere else, and out of the 
confused agglomeration of mutually alien provinces emerged larger 
and better defined groups with common tendencies and interests. 

“It will endure Metternich and me.” The French Revolution, 
Napoleon and the July upheavals had been withstood. But there was 
no withstanding steam. Steam forced its way through the Alps and 
the Bohemian forests, steam robbed the Danube of its role, steam 
tore Austrian barbarism to shreds and thereby pulled the ground 
from under the feet of the House of Hapsburg. 

In Europe and America they now have the pleasure of seeing 
Metternich and the whole House of Hapsburg crushed between the 
wheels of the steam-driven machines, and the Austrian monarchy 
being cut to pieces by its own locomotives. It is an exhilarating sight. 
The vassals rebel in Italy, and Austria dare not utter a word, the 
liberal pestilence invades Lombardy and Austria hesitates, vacillates, 
quakes before its own subjects. In Switzerland the oldest rebels 
against Austria, the Ur-Swiss, yield to Austrian suzerainty; they are 
attacked, but Austria shivers at the bold words of Ochsenbein: If 
only one single Austrian soldier enters Switzerland I will throw twenty 
thousand men into Lombardy and proclaim the Italian Republic. 
And Austria goes off to beg in vain for assistance from the despised 
courts of Munich, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe. In Bohemia, the estates 
refuse to pay their taxes of fifty thousand guilders; Austria still wants 

to enforce payment but needs its troops in the Alps so badly that for 
the first time since the foundation of Austria it has to give way to the 
estates and do without the fifty thousand guilders. In Hungary, the 
Diet is preparing revolutionary proposals and is sure of a majority 
for them. And Austria, which needs the Hungarian Hussars in 
Milan, Modena and Parma, Austria itself puts forward revolutionary 
proposals”** to the Diet although it knows very well that these are its 
own death warrant. This unshakable Austria, this eternal bulwark of 
barbarism, no longer knows where to turn. It is suffering from the 
most terrible rash; if it scratches itself in front then it itches behind, 
and if it scratches behind, then it itches in front. 

And with these comical scratchings, the House of Austria scratches 
itself out of existence. 

If old Metternich does not follow his “upright” Franz pretty 
quickly he may live to see the imperial monarchy which he held 
together at the price of such exertions falling apart and most of it 
into the hands of the bourgeoisie; he may live to have the 
unspeakable experience of seeing the ‘“burgher tailors” and 
“burgher grocers” refusing to doff their hats to him in the Prater?* 
and calling him plain Herr Metternich. A few more shocks, one or 
two more costly mobilisations and Charles Rothschild will buy up the 
whole Austrian monarchy. 

We observe the victory of the bourgeois over the Austrian imperial 
monarchy with real satisfaction. We only wish that it may be the 
really vile, really dirty, really Jewish bourgeois who buy up this 
venerable empire. Such a repulsive, flogging, paternal, lousy 
government deserves to be under the heel of a really lousy, unkempt 
stinking adversary. Herr Metternich can depend on us to shear this 
adversary later as ruthlessly as Metternich will soon be shorn by 
him. 

The fall of Austria has a special significance for us Germans. It is 
Austria which is responsible for our reputation of being the 
oppressors of foreign nations, the hirelings of reaction in all 
countries. Under the Austrian flag Germans have held Poland, 
Bohemia, Italy in bondage. We have to thank the Austrian monarchy 
for the Germans being hated as vile mercenaries of despotism from 
Syracuse to Trento, from Genoa to Venice. Anyone who has seen 
what deadly hatred, the bloody and completely justified thirst for 
revenge against the Tedeschi reign in Italy must be moved to an 
undying hatred of Austria and applaud when this bulwark of 
barbarism, this scourge of Germany collapses. 

We have every reason to hope that the Germans will revenge 
themselves on Austria for the infamy with which it has covered the 
German name. We have every reason to hope that it will be Germans 
who will overthrow Austria and clear away the obstacles in the way of 
freedom for the Slavs and Italians. Everything 1s ready: the victim 
lies there awaiting the knife which will cut its throat. May the 
Germans not lose their chance this time; may they be bold enough to 
say the words which Napoleon himself did not dare to utter— 

La dynastie de Habsbourg a cessé de régner.* 

Signed: F. E.