Political Considerations of Vienna Period
listeners, however, is found not in the chamber of a Parliament, but in great public mass-meetings.
Here there are thousands of people who have come simply to hear what the speaker has to tell them; while in the Chamber of Deputies there are but a few hundred, most of whom are there to receive extra pay, and by no means to be enlightened by the wisdom of some “honorable representative of the people.” But more than that, it is always the same audience, which will never learn anything new since it lacks not only the intelligence but the inclination, no matter how slight.
Never will one of these representatives bow of his own accord to superior truth, and then adopt it as his cause. No, nobody ever does such a thing unless he has reason to hope that by about-facing he can save his seat for another session. Only when it is in the air that the previous party will get off badly at a coming election do these ornaments of manhood make it their business to move over to the other and presumably more successful party or tendency; the shift usually takes place amid a cloudburst of moral explanations. Consequently a great migration always begins when an existing party seems to be in such popular disfavor that a crushing defeat is threatened; the parliamentary rats leave the party ship.
But this has nothing to do with superior knowledge or intentions; it is just a clairvoyant gift that warns the parliamentary vermin in time to fall into a new, warm, party bed.
To speak before such a “forum” is really only to cast pearls before the well-known quadrupeds. It is truly not worth while; the result cannot but be nil.
And nil it was. The Pan-German deputies could talk their throats sore: effect there was none.
The press either greeted them with dead silence or so distorted their speeches that any cohesion, often even any meaning was twisted or altogether lost. Public opinion consequently received a very bad impression of the new movement’s purposes. What the individual gentlemen said made no difference; the meaning lay in what one could read. But this was a mere fragment of their
109
