Bienerth Ministry. Beck's successor Bienerth[1] attempted to
rule by means of a Cabinet of mere officials, in which under-
secretaries of State were appointed as temporary directors of
their respective departments. Moreover the three chief nationalities, the Germans, Poles and Czechs, were each represented by
a so-called national minister (Landsmann-Minister). Bienerth's
policy was to confine himself in a purely objective spirit to the
execution of the laws until such time as he had gradually gained
the confidence of the nation. The Germans made their cooperation contingent on various conditions. They insisted that the
Government should introduce proposals as to the official language
of functionaries, for they feared a return of the procedure used by
Badeni, which by means of a Government ordinance had altered
the received usage and upset the national balance of power; that
in Bohemia the purely German sub-districts (Bezirke) should be
included in German districts (Kreise), and in like manner the
purely Czech sub-districts in Czech districts, so that there would
then be a relatively small number of territories of mixed nationality, which would have to be governed bilingually; that minorities
should be protected by law; and that in appointing to posts in
the offices of the autonomous Bohemian territorial Government,
proportionate consideration should be given to the Germans,
attention being paid to the fact that in Bohemia more than a
third of the population were German, and that they paid more
than half the taxes, but that the Czech national majority had
appointed more than 90% of Czechs and not even 10% of Germans in the Government offices. In purely German territories
moreover it was claimed that only German officials should be
appointed, just as in purely Czech territories the appointment of
Czech officials was already uncontroverted and looked upon as a
matter of course. Finally the old wish was put forward for a
separation of nationalities in the representative assembly at
Prague, in order that neither of the two nationalities should
oppress the other in the internal affairs of Bohemia.
These German demands, which were exactly analogous to those formerly put forward by the Czechs, so long as they were still in a minority, now roused violent opposition among the latter. They called attention to the fact that the Germans in earlier days were deaf to such requests; they saw in them a " dismemberment of the country," and asserted that in the central public departments of Vienna, too, the Czechs did not occupy a number of official positions in proportion to their population. Serious excesses were now indulged in towards the German population and the German students in Prague, where, on the very day of the imperial diamond jubilee, the Government had to proclaim a state of siege.
The Reichsrat, which reopened under such conditions in Nov. 1909, stood under the threat of a paralyzing Czech obstruction. This time the Poles came to the rescue of the Government in its hour of need, by getting a form of standing order approved which rendered obstruction somewhat more difficult, and in this, curiously enough, they were helped by the Czechs; for obstruction had brought even them into an impasse, since their financial requirements had not been met. Thus the law for strengthening of the standing orders was carried through by an ad hoc combination of Poles, Czechs and Christian Socialists. But the freedom of parliamentary activity did not last for long. On Feb. 13 Bienerth went part of the way to meet the German demands by introducing a bill dealing with the rearrangement of the administrative districts (Kreise) in Bohemia. According to the statistical returns there were 139 administrative sub-districts where only Czech was spoken and 95 speaking only German, as opposed to only five bilingual ones. These 239 sub-districts, according to the bill, were to be grouped in 20 districts, 10 Czech, six German and four bilingual, in which provision was to be made for minorities throughout the whole land through official translation bureaus. This bill was intended to be a solution of the language question, which should take into account the actual conditions of the population as well as practical needs. The excitement with which the Czechs opposed this measure was extraordinary. They brought about a scene in Parliament which ended in hand-to-hand fighting and assaults, whereupon the Government immediately closed the Parliament.
In other directions, too, Bienerth's period of government was Sited with hostile nationalist proceedings. The Italian students desired to revive the question of an Italian university, which had come to a deadlock, and in Nov. 1908 set on foot a great demonstration at the university of Vienna, in which the usual fairly harmless fighting with sticks was replaced by revolver shooting. In spite of this, Bienerth, with the consent of the Germans, introduced a bill in Jan. 1909 which was to set up an Italian faculty of laws provisionally in Vienna.
At this time the Czechs were trying to gain a foothold, in frontier lands which had hitherto been considered solely German. They alleged as a reason that two small country communes of Lower Austria, Ober- and Unter-Themmepau, had a mixed colony of Czechs and Croats; it was further advanced on their side that a considerable annual migration to Vienna took place, which became Germanized in the second generation, and so lost to their Czech nationality. Vienna, with over 100,000 Czechs, was actually the second largest Czech town. In reality a still clearer diminution of the Czech population of Vienna was noticeable; according to the census of 1900, out of 1,674,000 inhabitants there were 102,970 Czechs, i.e. 6-1%; in 1910, out of 2,030,000 inhabitants, 98,400 Czechs, i.e. 4-8 per cent. The Czech colonies in Vienna endeavoured, by means of the so-called " Komensky schools " (from the Czech form of the name of Komenius, the educationalist), to protect themselves against fusion with the indigenous population. The Viennese Germans saw in this a danger to the hitherto peaceful common life of the population of Vienna. On Sept. 3 1909 the Lower Austrian Diet, in opposition to these Czech encroachments, tried to establish German by law as the language of instruction in all the public schools of Lower Austria, in correspondence with the actual state of affairs hitherto. On Oct. 7 Burgomaster Lueger insisted that Vienna could only be a unilingual city, as otherwise she would have to speak nine languages; and on Jan. 18 1910 this resolution received the force of law. Analogous laws were promulgated in the three other purely German Crown lands.
After the Tauern railway had been built for the Alpine countries without, it is true, any particular pecuniary help from the Polish part of the empire, which was known to be only passively interested the Poles demanded a complete carrying into effect and extension of the waterways law, with a larger State subsidy. It was over these demands in connexion with the waterways, which the Minister of Finance declared to be impossible of fulfilment to the extent required by the Poles, that Bienerth's mainstay failed to support him; and on Dec. 12 he sent in his resignation, which was, however, followed by a renewed Bienerth Ministry, composed of Germans, Poles and officials. By means of this coalition the Ministry succeeded, indeed, in passing the military service reforms on April 24 1911 (reduction of the three years' service -to two years, combined with an increase in the contingent of recruits); but this com- pletely exhausted its parliamentary strength, and the first parliamentary suffrage Parliament ended with but poor results in the midst of unsolved national problems.
Since 1910 a meat shortage in Austria had made itself more and more felt, especially in the towns, owing to their rapid growth, the decrease of cattle-raising in the Alpine lands, and the reduction in the imports of Serbian meat through the anti-Serbian agrarian policy of Hungary. The Christian Socialist party, from being originally an urban party, had become partly an urban and partly a peasant party, and the Minister of Commerce, Weisskirchner,[2] who had come from its ranks, had not
- ↑ Baron Richard Bienerth-Schmerling (1853-1919) was made Minister of the Interior in June 1906; Prime Minister Nov. 1908-June 1911 ; and till 1915 he was Statthalter for Lower Austria.
- ↑ Richard Weisskirchner (b. 1861 in Vienna) entered the municipal service in 1883 and became in 1903 president of the town council; 1909-11 Minister of Commerce; 1912-8 Burgomaster of Vienna; a deputy from 1896 onwards; and in 1907 president of the Chamber of Deputies. He was a disciple of Lueger, a Christian Socialist, and framed a new municipal statute and associations based on the Christian view of society.
