Karl Marx

From the English.

["New-York Daily Tribune" No. 5655 of June 6, 1859]

Vienna, May 14, 1859

The Prussian General Willisen (brother of the other Prussian general of the same name, who gained some fame through his works on military science and lost it again through his conduct of the Schleswig-Holstein war) has arrived here, purportedly sent from Berlin to receive the feeble-minded King of Prussia and his Queen <Friedrich Wilhelm IV and Elisabeth> on their homeward journey from Italy. His real commission is said to be confined to two points—firstly, to warn Austria against continuing its intrigues in the Frankfurt Bundestag, since Prussia is not inclined to allow itself to be dictated to by the Vienna Cabinet under the cloak of the German Confederation that exists on paper; secondly, to sweeten the pill thus administered by the definite assurance that Prussia is now finally resolved upon “armed mediation”. This ambiguous expression is interpreted as follows: Prussia, having put its house in order and armed itself to the teeth, will address some new peace proposals to Bonaparte and, upon their rejection, throw its sword into the scales. Simultaneously with this important communication, the Austrian government has received, via Berne, the news that the Russo-French treaty, apart from its still unknown secret stipulations, binds France to restrict the war to the limits corresponding to its alleged aim, the liberation of Italy, while Russia pledges itself, at the first actual intervention of the German Confederation in the struggle, to send an army of at least 300,000 men across its borders.

There is great dissatisfaction here with General Gyulay’s old-fashioned strategy, and rumours of his dismissal are being circulated. General Heß is named as his successor. But no such step appears to be intended so far, as Colonel Kuhn, the most outstanding officer of the Austrian staff, has been dispatched to support General Gyulay’s vacillating decisions. Gyulay himself is a Magyar. He was born in Pest on September 1, 1798. At the age of 16 he entered, as second lieutenant, an infantry regiment commanded by his father; he was then assigned to the hussars, appointed major of the Kaiser Uhlans in September 1827, shortly afterwards colonel of the 19th Infantry Regiment, and advanced in 1837 to the dignity of major-general and brigade general in St. Pölten. In 1845 he commanded the 33rd Infantry Regiment in Vienna; in 1846, having attained the rank of lieutenant field marshal, he was sent to Trieste as divisional commander and supreme military commandant. In 1848 he found the opportunity to render good service in this post. Having, on his own responsibility, himself taken over command of the navy, he dismissed the suspect Italian officers and sailors, brought the warships in the various stations on the Dalmatian coast to safety, and rescued some warships that were already on their way to Venice. He ordered the necessary defensive measures in Trieste, Pola, Pirano and other important points on the coast, secured the borders threatened by insurrection, and prepared the offensive that was launched by Feldzeugmeister Count Nugent on April 17, 1848, after the arrival of reinforcements from the inland provinces. A rowing flotilla organised by Gyulay supported the army’s coastal operations. On May 23, the Piedmontese fleet appeared before Trieste but was held in check by the preparations he had made; its attempt to surprise the more distant battery of St. Barcola was likewise foiled. The Piedmontese fleet alarmed Trieste for the last time on June 8, but, finding Gyulay prepared for all eventualities, it withdrew from sight of the city on July 4 and, after the Battle of Custozza, from the Adriatic Sea. As a reward for these services, Gyulay received various orders from the Emperor and the freedom of the city from the Trieste municipality. After having been entrusted, at the beginning of June 1849, with the direction of the Austrian War Ministry, he is said to have displayed great energy and activity. At the capture of Raab, he was in the Emperor’s retinue. From Vienna, where he had returned to his post, he hastened, on receiving the news of the defeat at Acs, at once to Komorn in order to take the necessary measures there. Later he was sent on a tour of inspection through the whole Empire and presented his report to Franz Joseph. After surrendering the War Ministry in July 1850 and assuming command of the Fifth Corps in Milan, he was appointed Feldzeugmeister and received the Order of the Golden Fleece. After Radetzky’s retirement, he received the command of the Second Army, which he has now led against Piedmont. He is one of those Austrian generals who, for the most part Slavonians or Magyars by birth, have covered themselves with shame by the flogging of women and other hideous brutalities.

Two battalions of Viennese volunteers have already marched off to the theatre of war, and a third battalion follows them today. These volunteers, who belong to the autochthonous suburban aristocracy, were dressed in the uniforms of the legionaries of 1848 and were at first the heroes of the day. Balls, concerts and theatrical entertainments were there for them in abundance, and even the Austrian waltz-Orpheus, Herr Strauß, composed a new march in their honour before his rather unpatriotic departure for Petersburg. It cannot, however, be denied that the popularity of these newly baked warriors has recently sunk alarmingly. These primitive louts from the suburbs took things rather too freely with beer and cigars and towards the fair sex, and sometimes considerably overstepped the limits even of Viennese “humour”. What they are they say themselves in their favourite song:

I am a true Viennese,
Lead a merry life,
And so my father
Gave me to the Deutschmeisters;
Deutschmeister is a
Very jolly regiment,
Holds in one hand the sabre,
In the other the Ziment.

<the verses in the “N.-Y. D. T.” in German and English>

(Ziment, I must add, is a drinking vessel for beer that holds an absolutely enormous quantity of liquid.)

One of the heroic deeds of these “free and merry” men took a rather serious turn and was rightly censured by the press. Our friends’ barracks are situated on the Salzgries, a square which, like the streets leading to it, is mainly inhabited by Israelites. The Jews from Galicia, who have business to transact in Vienna, are also in the habit of betaking themselves to these rather dirty regions. Now when our heroic fellows returned one evening from the “Sperl”, where they had been publicly fêted and congratulated on their prospective heroism, to their barracks, they gave, in their rather excited frame of mind, a foretaste of their future deeds by falling without further ado upon the unfortunate Israelites. They smashed the windows of some, trampled others underfoot, cut off the beards of many, and even threw one unhappy victim into a tar barrel. People quietly going by were accosted with the question “Bist du ein Jude?” [Are you a Jew?], and when the answer was affirmative, mercilessly beaten amidst loud exclamations like “Macht nichts, der Jud wird geprügelt!” [Never mind, the Jew is to be thrashed!] <this exclamation in the “N.-Y. D. T.” in German and English>. The exaggerated sentimentality of these Viennese fellows may be inferred from the following fact: a shoemaker’s apprentice of fifteen, who had been refused admission to the volunteer corps by the recruiting officer, hanged himself out of despair.

The money and financial difficulties are becoming visible in all spheres, from the highest to the lowest. Firstly, as you will already have gathered from the European press, the Emperor himself has pawned the crown jewels. Secondly, whichever organ of the Viennese press one takes up, a column entitled “Patriotic Donations” invariably appears in a conspicuous place. These patriotic sacrifices, which are made either for war purposes in general or for the formation of volunteer corps in particular, vary considerably in size; some amount to only 2 florins 2 kreuzer, others attain the respectable height of 10,000 to 12,000 florins. Alongside the gifts of money, here and there gifts of a more medieval kind are listed, such as a pair of revolvers from a gunsmith, paper for cartridges from a paper manufacturer, cloth for uniforms from a clothier, etc. Between the gifts of private individuals figure more or less suspect collections from provincial communities, which are brought about under the official pressure of their petty officials and Bürgermeister <Bürgermeister: German and English in the “N.-Y. D. T.”>. A common feature, however, distinguishes all the larger contributions, namely that they are rendered not in the form of money but in the form of state bonds and coupons of state funds, so that the state is literally paid with “its own coin”. The most infallible sign of the money difficulties, which meets you at every step, is the complete disappearance of the small coins for the cash transactions of daily life. The moment the suspension of cash payments by the bank was announced, together with the accompanying financial measures, the small metal currency, both copper and silver, vanished as if touched by a magic wand. People resorted to the same primitive method of cutting up large banknotes into aliquot parts that had so astonished the foreign visitor to Vienna in 1848: every holder of a one-florin banknote cuts it into as many pieces as he needs in order to make his small purchases. The government has attempted to halt this fragmentation process in Vienna and in the provinces by a proclamation in which it announced to the public that no more fragments of banknotes would be accepted in payment by the tax collector and by the bank. With regard to the bank, this announcement appears unlawful, since a law dating from 1848 still exists which obliges the bank to accept such fractions of bills, and there is even a whole system at the bank for calculating them. It has been officially declared that 28,000,000 florins in small change were in circulation, a sum which, it is added, exceeded the actual requirement by twice the amount. The authorities are therefore “determined to counteract the foolish speculation that is currently making small change scarce”. By establishing that small change exists in abundance, however, the obvious shortage of this necessary article is by no means remedied.

The authorities should have known that the agio on silver has risen powerfully, that even copper carries an agio of 10 per cent and that everywhere the peasantry is hoarding anything that rings like metal. The governors of Bohemia and Lower Austria have reminded the public of a law that punishes all agiotage with silver and copper coins with a fine of fifty gulden and more – but it is all in vain. Such defensive measures miss their effect all the more surely when they are linked to official announcements such as the notice in the official section of the *Wiener Zeitung* that the silver pieces of six kreuzers will be withdrawn from legal circulation in the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom from 1 June. The government will ultimately be compelled to comply with the petition of the Chamber of Commerce of Lower Austria and, however shameful it may be, to issue banknotes of the considerable value of 5, 10 and 25 kreuzers for retail transactions.

Rising from the low regions of retail transactions to those of the money market and of trade in the truest sense of the word, we must first note the bankruptcy, already known to you, of the eminent firm Arnstein & Eskeles, which was declared on 5 May. They were the leading bill brokers of the capital, who were chiefly responsible for discounting the bills that were not immediately traded at the bank, and for rediscounting the bills of manufacturers and merchants from the provinces. Besides the money transactions of the capital, those of the manufacturers of Hungary, Bohemia and Silesia were also concentrated in their hands. The firm prided itself on an 80-year existence, and its head, Baron von Eskeles, united in his hands the offices of director of the National Bank, consul-general of Denmark, chairman of the Discount Company of Lower Austria, president of the Society for State Railways, administrator of the Southern Railway, etc. He was, in a word, next to Rothschild the highest financial authority of the empire. Arnstein & Eskeles had played a significant role at the time of the Congress of Vienna, when the salon of Frau von Arnstein formed a centre for the social gatherings of the political and literary celebrities of the day. One of the immediate causes that led to this bankruptcy, which involves a sum of about 30,000,000 dollars, was the refusal of the Paris Crédit mobilier to honour the bills of the Vienna firm. After its collapse, not a day passed without a whole list of bankruptcies being registered on the Vienna Stock Exchange; the most important among these firms are: Solomon Cammando, Eidam & Co., G. Blanc, Plecher & Co., Diem & English, I. F. Gaartner, F. C. Schmidt, M. Greger & Co., the brothers Pokaray, Moritz Kollinsky, Karl Zohler, A. Kirschmann, and others. This catastrophe was immediately followed by bankruptcies connected with it in the Austrian provinces, as in Brünn, Prague, Reichenberg, Lemberg, etc.; the most significant of these was the collapse of the firm Lutteroth & Co. in Trieste, whose head is Prussian consul and director of the Austrian Lloyd. Beyond the borders of the Austrian state, several first-class houses in Breslau, Magdeburg, Munich, Frankfurt, as well as the Loan and Commercial Bank in Kassel, have failed. Quite generally, the present panic is reminiscent of the commercial panic in Hamburg in the autumn of 1857, and the Hamburg measures to calm the panic are likewise being imitated by the government. The bill-of-exchange legislation is to undergo a mitigation, the National Bank will form a commission to support the firms that have been forced to suspend payments solely by the momentary general discredit, and the banks of Prague and Brünn are to be granted two million in paper money.