THE AUSTRIAN MUDDLE
denying that his remarks partook of the nature of a demand, he added: “I surely cannot be reproached for being ready to accept from the whole world what the niggardly and harsh attitude of those at home withholds from me.”
The above summary should make it clear that in Austria at present the authorities are living from hand to mouth, and that political chaos is aggravating the already desperate economic and financial situation. Even in Hungary, with whose political situation we propose to deal next week, there are similar signs of political disintegration. In both countries the Governments seem in their alarm to cling more firmly to the German alliance as the solitary hope in stormy times.
“The Potsdam Figleaf”
A distinguished German Socialist once described the democratic franchise of the Reichstag as “a fig-leaf to cover the naked absolutism of Potsdam. To-day we are grateful to the author of that phrase for giving us the true measure of the so-called democratisation of Germany. The present ferment in German politics is due to the desire for a “German peace,” and not to any genuine national insistence on popular government. The German people are less politically inclined, and therefore less educated in political principles, than any of the great nations of the world. They are more open to interested suggestion and can be prompted to make any demand which is convenient to their rulers. Having never acquired the habit of independent political thought, having accepted the most servile Press in Europe as their mouthpiece, they are helpless in any crisis whose solution demands resolute political action. The Social Democrats themselves are the victims of this impotence; and their numerical strength in the Reichstag is in inverse proportion to their real political power. Thus, when their leader, Herr Scheidemann, returns from Stockholm with the message that the “democratisation of Germany is the straight road to peace, the Kaiser meets him with an edict promising Prussian reform. And yet, before the ink is dry on the document, the Kaiser dismisses the Minister who signed it and replaces him with an able bureaucrat whom the Frankfurter Zeitung greets as an absolute Prussian in whose
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