Parliament in order to avail itself of these emergency paragraphs.
This procedure has often been blamed as unconstitutional ; but the
excuse must be taken into account that a constitution which provides
such an emergency exit must be prepared for use to be made of it.
The situation was often such that Parliament would not work, and
the Government was faced with the alternative of stopping the
machine of State or availing itself of emergency decrees. Such
occasions arose even before the war on an average every two years.
The Reichsrat's right of control was secured after the event by the fact that the Government was bound, the next time it assembled, to lay the emergency decrees before it within four weeks; and that it could refuse its ratification. But before the war the Reichsrat never exercised this right, and thus each time the Government's proceed- ings were whitewashed. It was only in 1917 that the emergency decrees promulgated by the Sturgkh Ministry at the beginning of the war failed to receive ratification, in retaliation for the suppression of trial by jury by a military trial and the extension over civilians of the jurisdiction of the military courts. The normal processes of criminal jurisdiction were consequently restored. On July 26 1914 Sturgkh closed Parliament altogether, and non-parliamentary absolutism reigned for three years. At last Sturgkh 's second successor again summoned the Reichsrat; but since its six years' mandate was ex-
Siring, it was prolonged by a special law towards the end of 1918. n the break-up of the State in 1918 the German deputies of this rump Parliament assembled to form the constituent national as- sembly of German Austria, while in the Czechoslovak and Yugo- slav states there were committees from which the German and Italian deputies were excluded, which proceeded to take measures towards forming states.
Organized obstruction of parliamentary business by a section of members has been, of course, not confined to Austria. But it was in Austria that this singular procedure was first brought to technical perfection; and it became an Austrian speciality. The reason for this was that every party had cause to fear parliamentary oppression at the hands of other nationalities, and this was why it was long impossible to reconcile the principal parties in the House to any effective remedy. It was not till the end of 1909 that this was achieved by a tightening of the standing orders.
The standing orders under which the business of the Reichsrat was conducted were, as the law originally stood (1867 and 1873), intended for a dignified assembly of which each member aimed at avoiding disturbances. With the extension of the suffrage and the growth of nationalist conflicts, the powers of the president were no longer sufficient, and he was unable to deal with the obstruction of even a small group. At last, on Dec. 17 1909, after an 86-hour sitting, entirely occupied with debates on emergency motions, an emergency motion as to new standing orders proposed by the Polish group was passed; on the following day the Upper House adopted these resolutions, and on Dec. 20 1909 the new law was promulgated. By its provisions communications from the Govern- ment and the other House, and reports of commissions, had to take precedence of other business; further, the president could postpone to the end of the sitting formal motions, interpellations, emergency motions, and other obstructive measures. In the long run, however, even this palliative ceased to work; and accordingly on June 5 1917 a new stiffening of the standing orders was voted, which sufficed in effect during the later period of the Parliament.
Language Question. There was no law regulating the question of what language was to be used in parliamentary debates. Every deputy might speak in his mother tongue; but custom had brought it about that, in order to be understood by the whole House, the members of Parliament spoke German. It was not till the Taaffe Government that it became a frequent thing for individual Slav deputies to speak in their own language. These speeches were generally not recorded by the stenographer; the Slavs protected themselves against this by gradually getting it accepted that poly- glot stenographers should be appointed, that their speeches should be translated, and that they should be added as appendices to the parliamentary reports in the correct national language; finally it was resolved (June 1917) that all speeches should be reported verbatim in the parliamentary reports, in the language in which they were delivered. The Upper House agreed, but expressed its misgivings as to such a polyglot report of proceedings.
Administrative Commission for Bohemia. In June 1913 the Government considered itself justified by necessity of the State in adopting a measure which in many respects was held to be a breach of the constitution; it appointed a commission for Bohemia, the members of which were nominated by the State, to deal with the autonomous affai s of this country. Since the last election in the spring of 1908 the Bohemian Diet had been unworkable, eventually owing to obstruction on the part of the Germans, who saw them- selves handed over hopelessly to the Czech majority, until a rearrangement of the voting groups (curiae) should afford them pro- tection against Czech oppression. In 1913 the Germans sent in a petition that each nationality should pay the costs of its own educational and cultural institutions, as otherwise one nationality would have to bear the expenses of the other, and vice versa. When the Czechs refused this request the Germans responded with more obstinate obstruction. The representative assembly now ceased to work, and since no legal expedient could in consequence be found
by which legislation and current business could be carried on. the Government stepped in and appointed a mixed commission of Germans and Czechs, which should, as it were, administer the affairs of this country like a trustee for a person incapable of volition. This commission was admitted to have exercised its functions with impartiality as a matter of fact; but as a matter of form it stood on a weak foundation. The Germans were thereby deprived of their weapon of obstruction, and the Czechs lost the power of misusing their majority to oppress the Germans. The Czechs declared this to be a breach of the constitution; but the courts recognized the national commission as a measure of necessity justified in law. And so it subsisted until the break-up of the monarchy.
Administration. The organization of the administrative system in the Austrian Empire was complicated by the fact that between the State and the purely local communal administration there intruded yet a third element, grounded in history, the territories (Lander). The State administration comprised all affairs having relation to rights, duties and interests " which are common to all territories"; all other administrative tasks were left to the territories. Finally, the communes had self-government within their own sphere.
To this division of the work of administration corresponded a three-fold organization of the authorities: State, territorial and communal. The State authorities were divided on geographical lines into central, intermediate and local, and side by side with this there was a division of the offices for the transaction of business according to the various branches of the administration. The central authori- ties, which as early as the i8th century worked together in a common mother cell of the State chancery, became differentiated so soon as the growing tasks of administration called for specialization; in 1869 there were seven departments, and in the concluding decade of the Austrian Empire there were set up Ministries of Labour, Food, Public Health and Social Care. Under these ministries came the Statthalter, whose administrative area had ordinarily the proportions of a Crown territory (Kronland) but the immense variations in area of the Crown territories made a uniform and consistent intermediate administra- tive organization practically impossible. The lowest administrative unit was the political sub-district (Bezirk) under an official (Bezirks- hauptmann), who united nearly all the administrative functions which were divided among the various ministries according to their attributions.
Side by side with the State administration certain Crown territory administrations also existed in the 17 Crown territories, carried on by selected honorary officials, having under them a staff of pro- fessional officials. Many branches of the territorial administration had great similarities with those of the State, so that their spheres of activity frequently overlapped and came into collision. This administrative double track," as it was called, led, it is true, in many cases to lively emulation, but was on the whole highly extrava- gant. The evils of this complicated system are obvious, and easy to condemn. They can be explained, partly by the origin of the State for the most part through a voluntary union of countries possessed by a strong sense of their own individuality partly by the influence in Austria of the Germanic spirit, well understood by the Slavs, which has nothing of the Latin tendency to reduce all questions of administration to clear-cut formulae as part of a logically consistent system. Like the English administrative system, the Austrian presented a rich variety, a variety indeed so rich that it clamoured for drastic reform.
Bienerth's last act as premier in May 1911 was the appointment of a commission nominated by the Emperor, to draw up a scheme of administrative reform. So early as 1904 Korber had declared a com- plete change in the principles of administration to be essential if the machinery of State were to continue working. After seven years of inaction, however, this imperial rescript was pitched in a far lower key. The continuous progress of society, it said, had made increased demands on the administration, that is to say, it was assumed that reform was not demanded so much by the defects of the administra- tion but by the progress of the times, not because the administration was bad, but because life was better. It was an attempt to reform the administration without first reforming the State on equivalent lines. A reform commission without a programme naturally first occupied itself with reforms about which there was no controversy. After a year had gone by it drew up " Proposals for the training of State officials." After another two years it had indeed brought to light carefully prepared material for study, which was of great scientific value; but its proposals, though politically of importance, did not provide any basis for reform on a large scale. And so when the World War broke put the commission dispersed without practical results, leaving behind it an imposing array of folio volumes of great scien- tific value. It was not till March 1918 that the Seidler Government decided upon a programme of national autonomy as a basis for administrative reform, which was, however, never carried into effect.
Education. The organization of the Austrian elementary schools was based on the principle of compulsory school attendance, free education, and the imparting of public instruction in the child's own language. Side by side with these existed private schools. The proportion of. children attending private schools to those attending the public elementary schools in 1912 was 144,000 to 4-5 millions, i.e. a thirtieth part. Hence the accusation of denationalizing children through the Schulvereine must be accepted with caution. The
