THE NEW EUROPE
Francis Joseph was clever enough not to check the economic development. His passivity sometimes made it possible for some abler men in the Government to create institutions and to pass laws which, in themselves, were reasonable and good, and thus the Austrian constitution contains some good and progressive elements, but a brutal and regardless administration frustrated the best laws, and a Governmental decree could circumvent both law and legal custom. Owing to this absence of all positive or constructive rule, Austria and Hungary under Francis Joseph degenerated into a system of conscious violence, securing to the German and Magyar minorities an outrageous domination. Upon this ruling minority, as upon its master, lies the responsibility for this war, abhorred and detested by the other nations. A neutral diplomatist in Rome is credited with the assertion that, since the beginning of the war, more than 80,000 persons—civilians and military—have been executed in Austria and Hungary, in Bohemia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dalmatia,
and in the Trentino, in Serbia and Montenegro. It is to be hoped that the true figures have been exaggerated; but, even at the best, the war is not only a war against the Allies but against the majority of their own nations. Francis Joseph was neither kind nor generous, nor was he ever noble, reliable, or true, however the paid eulogist may insist upon such qualities. Since the execution of the Hungarian generals in Arad (the carrying out of the sentence was actually postponed to the 6th of October in order to avenge the death of Count Latour, whom the mob had hanged on the same day of the previous year), Francis Joseph sanctioned many political acts of brutal vengeance and flagrant injustice; the condemnation and sentence to death of the Bohemian leaders during the war were merely the latest deed of this kind. Francis Joseph is a warning example of the perils of monarchism—of the gross immorality of unrestricted absolutism masquerading under modern constitutional and parliamentary forms in order to hide its own nakedness. Francis Joseph's numerous adulators extol his aristocratic nature; but he was only an aristocrat in the sense of Mickiewicz's dictum, that Austria is an East Indian Company exploited by two hundred families. The rigid rule of Spanish etiquette was the only law which was accepted by the Austrian Emperor. He abhorred democracy, for democracy means publicity,
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