Page:EB1911 - Volume 16.djvu/102

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LA HOZ Y MOTA—LAIBACH

college, the Aitchison Chiefs’ College for the sons of native noblemen, and a number of other high schools and technical and special schools.

The District of Lahore has an area of 3704 sq. m., and its population in 1901 was 1,162,109, consisting chiefly of Punjabi Mahommedans with a large admixture of Hindus and Sikhs. In the north-west the district includes a large part of the barren Rechna Doab, while south of the Ravi is a desolate alluvial tract, liable to floods. The Manjha plateau, however, between the Ravi and the Beas, has been rendered fertile by the Bari Doab canal. The principal crops are wheat, pulse, millets, maize, oil-seeds and cotton. There are numerous factories for ginning and pressing cotton. Irrigation is provided by the main line of the Bari Doab canal and its branches, and by inundation-cuts from the Sutlej. The district is crossed in several directions by lines of the North-Western railway. Lahore, Kasur, Chunian and Raiwind are the chief trade centres.

The Division of Lahore extends along the right bank of the Sutlej from the Himalayas to Multan. It comprises the six districts of Sialkot, Gujranwala, Montgomery, Lahore, Amritsar and Gurdaspur. Total area, 17,154 sq. m.; pop. (1901) 5,598,463. The commissioner for the division also exercises political control over the hill state of Chamba. The common language of the rural population and of artisans is Punjabi; while Urdu or Hindustani is spoken by the educated classes. So far from the seaboard, the range between extremes of winter and summer temperature in the sub-tropics is great. The mean temperature in the shade in June is about 92° F., in January about 50°. In midsummer the thermometer sometimes rises to 115° in the shade, and remains on some occasions as high as 105° throughout the night. In winter the morning temperature is sometimes as low as 20°. The rainfall is uncertain, ranging from 8 in. to 25, with an average of 15 in. The country as a whole is parched and arid, and greatly dependent on irrigation.


LA HOZ Y MOTA, JUAN CLAUDIO DE (1630?–1710?), Spanish dramatist, was born in Madrid. He became a knight of Santiago in 1653, and soon afterwards succeeded his father as regidor of Burgos. In 1665 he was nominated to an important post at the Treasury, and in his later years acted as official censor of the Madrid theatres. On the 13th of August 1709 he signed his play entitled Josef, salvador de Egipto, and is presumed to have died in the following year. Hoz is not remarkable for originality of conception, but his recasts of plays by earlier writers are distinguished by an adroitness which accounts for the esteem in which he was held by his contemporaries. El Montañés Juan Pascal and El castigo de la miseria, reprinted in the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, give a just idea of his adaptable talent.


LAHR, a town in the grand-duchy of Baden, on the Schutter, about 9 m. S. of Offenburg, and on the railway Dinglingen-Lahr. Pop. (1900) 13,577. One of the busiest towns in Baden, it carries on manufactures of tobacco and cigars, woollen goods, chicory, leather, pasteboard, hats and numerous other articles, has considerable trade in wine, while among its other industries are printing and lithography. Lahr first appears as a town in 1278, and after several vicissitudes it passed wholly to Baden in 1803.

See Stein, Geschichte und Beschreibung der Stadt Lahr (Lahr, 1827); and Sütterlin, Lahr und seine Umgebung (Lahr, 1904).


LAIBACH (Slovenian, Ljubljana), capital of the Austrian duchy of Carniola, 237 m. S.S.W. of Vienna by rail. Pop. (1900) 36,547, mostly Slovene. It is situated on the Laibach, near its influx into the Save, and consists of the town proper and eight suburbs. Laibach is an episcopal see, and possesses a cathedral in the Italian style, several beautiful churches, a town hall in Renaissance style and a castle, built in the 15th century, on the Schlossberg, an eminence which commands the town. Laibach is the principal centre of the national Slovenian movement, and it contains a Slovene theatre and several societies for the promotion of science and literature in the native tongue. The Slovenian language is in general official use, and the municipal administration is purely Slovenian. The industries include manufactures of pottery, bricks, oil, linen and woollen cloth, fire-hose and paper.

Laibach is supposed to occupy the site of the ancient Emona or Aemona, founded by the emperor Augustus in 34 B.C. It was besieged by Alaric in 400, and in 451 it was desolated by the Huns. In 900 Laibach suffered much from the Magyars, who were, however, defeated there in 914. In the 12th century the town passed into the hands of the dukes of Carinthia; in 1270 it was taken by Ottocar of Bohemia; and in 1277 it came under the Habsburgs. In the early part of the 15th century the town was several times besieged by the Turks. The bishopric was founded in 1461. On the 17th of March 1797 and again on the 3rd of June 1809 Laibach was taken by the French, and from 1809 to 1813 it became the seat of their general government of the Illyrian provinces. From 1816 to 1849 Laibach was the capital of the kingdom of Illyria. The town is also historically known from the congress of Laibach, which assembled here in 1821 (see below). Laibach suffered severely on the 14th of April 1895 from an earthquake.

Congress or Conference of Laibach.—Before the break-up of the conference of Troppau (q.v.), it had been decided to adjourn it till the following January, and to invite the attendance of the king of Naples, Laibach being chosen as the place of meeting. Castlereagh, in the name of Great Britain, had cordially approved this invitation, as “implying negotiation” and therefore as a retreat from the position taken up in the Troppau Protocol. Before leaving Troppau, however, the three autocratic powers, Russia, Austria and Prussia, had issued, on the 8th of December 1820, a circular letter, in which they reiterated the principles of the Protocol, i.e. the right and duty of the powers responsible for the peace of Europe to intervene to suppress any revolutionary movement by which they might conceive that peace to be endangered (Hertslet, No. 105). Against this view Castlereagh once more protested in a circular despatch of the 19th of January 1821, in which he clearly differentiated between the objectionable general principles advanced by the three powers, and the particular case of the unrest in Italy, the immediate concern not of Europe at large, but of Austria and of any other Italian powers which might consider themselves endangered (Hertslet, No. 107).

The conference opened on the 26th of January 1821, and its constitution emphasized the divergences revealed in the above circulars. The emperors of Russia and Austria were present in person, and with them were Counts Nesselrode and Capo d’Istria, Metternich and Baron Vincent; Prussia and France were represented by plenipotentiaries. But Great Britain, on the ground that she had no immediate interest in the Italian question, was represented only by Lord Stewart, the ambassador at Vienna, who was not armed with full powers, his mission being to watch the proceedings and to see that nothing was done beyond or in violation of the treaties. Of the Italian princes, Ferdinand of Naples and the duke of Modena came in person; the rest were represented by plenipotentiaries.

It was soon clear that a more or less open breach between Great Britain and the other powers was inevitable, Metternich was anxious to secure an apparent unanimity of the powers to back the Austrian intervention in Naples, and every device was used to entrap the English representative into subscribing a formula which would have seemed to commit Great Britain to the principles of the other allies. When these devices failed, attempts were made unsuccessfully to exclude Lord Stewart from the conferences on the ground of defective powers. Finally he was forced to an open protest, which he caused to be inscribed on the journals, but the action of Capo d’Istria in reading to the assembled Italian ministers, who were by no means reconciled to the large claims implied in the Austrian intervention, a declaration in which as the result of the “intimate union established by solemn acts between all the European powers” the Russian emperor offered to the allies “the aid of his arms, should new revolutions threaten new dangers,” an attempt to revive that idea of a “universal union” based on the Holy Alliance (q.v.) against which Great Britain had consistently protested.

The objections of Great Britain were, however, not so much to an Austrian intervention in Naples as to the far-reaching principles by which it was sought to justify it. King Ferdinand had been invited to Laibach, according to the circular of the