Chapter X

Then surely round that mountain rude,
And Bridgeton's rill and pathway lone,
In years to come, when thon, the Wooed,
And thy fond Worshipper are gone,
Each suppliant prayer, each ardent tone,
Each vow the heart could once supply,
Whose every pulse was there thine own,
In many an evening breeze will sigh.

FOOTNOTE:

[29] It was the fanciful opinion of Hume that the purer Divinities of pagan worship, and the system of the Homeric Olympus, were so lastingly beautiful, that somewhere or other they must, to this hour, continue to exist.

AUSTRIA AND HUNGARY.

We have been so much accustomed to regard the Austrian empire as one German nation, that we sometimes forget of how many separate kingdoms and principalities it consists, and of how many different and disunited races its population is composed. It may not, therefore, be unnecessary to recall attention to the fact that the Austrian dominions of the last three hundred years--the Austrian empire of our times--consists of three kingdoms and many minor principalities, inhabited by five distinct races, whose native tongues are unintelligible to each other, and who have no common language in which they can communicate; who are divided by religious differences; who preserve their distinctive characteristics, customs, and feelings; whose sentiments are mutually unfriendly, and who are, to this day, unmixed in blood. The Germans, the Italians, the Majjars or Hungarians, the Sclaves, and the Wallacks, are distinct and alien races--without community of origin, of language, of religion, or of sentiments. Except the memory of triumphs and disasters common to them all, their allegiance to one sovereign is now, as it was three centuries ago, the only bond that unites them. Yet, in all the vicissitudes of fortune--some of them disastrous--which this empire has survived, these nations and races have held together. The inference is inevitable--whatever may have been its defects, that form of government could not have been altogether unfit for its purposes, which so many different kingdoms and races united to support and maintain.

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that these various states were under one form of government. There were almost as many forms of government as there were principalities; but they were all monarchical, and one sovereign happened to become the monarch of the whole. The house of Hapsburg, in which the imperial crown of Germany, the regal crowns of Hungary, Bohemia, and Lombardy, and the ducal crowns of Austria, Styria, the Tyrol, and nearly a dozen other principalities, became hereditary, acquired their possessions, not by conquest, but by election, succession, or other legitimate titles[30] recognised by the people. The descendants of Rodolph thus became the sovereigns of many separate states, each of which retained, as a matter of right, its own constitution. The sovereign, his chief advisers, and the principal officers of state at his court, were usually Germans by birth, or by education and predilection; but the constitution of each state--the internal administration, and those parts of the machinery of government with which the people came more immediately into contact--were their own. In some we find the monarchy elective, as in Hungary, Bohemia, and Styria; in all we find diets of representatives or delegates, chosen by certain classes of the people, without whose concurrence taxes could not be imposed, troops levied, or legislative measures enacted; and we find municipal institutions founded on a broad basis of representation. In none of them was the form of government originally despotic.

To the unquestionable titles by which they acquired their crowns--titles by which the pride of nation or of race was not wounded--and to the more or less perfect preservation, in each state, of its national institutions and privileges--to the enjoyment by each people of their laws, their language, customs, and prejudices--the princes of the house of Hapsburg owed the allegiance of subjects who had little else in common. There, as elsewhere in continental Europe, the sovereign long continued to encroach upon the rights of his subjects, and at length usurped an authority not recognised by the laws of his different possessions, or consistent with the conditions on which he had received their crowns. These usurpations were frequently resisted, and not unfrequently by force of arms. Belgium asserted her independence, and was permanently separated from Austria. But, in such contests, the sovereign of many separate states had obvious advantages. His subjects, divided by differences of race, language, religion, and sentiment, were incapable of combining against him; and however solicitous each people might be to preserve their own liberties and privileges, they were not prepared to resist encroachments on those of a neighbouring people, for whom they had no friendly feeling. The Austrians and Italians were ready to assert the emperor's authority in Hungary or Bohemia, the Hungarians and Bohemians to put down resistance in Lombardy. Even in the same kingdom the races were not united. In Hungary, the Sclave was sometimes ready to aid the emperor against the Majjar, the German against the Sclave. The disunion which was a source of weakness to the empire was a source of strength to the emperor.

Partly by compulsory changes, effected according to constitutional forms, partly by undisguised usurpations, in which these forms were disregarded, the emperors were thus enabled to extend the prerogative of the crown, to abridge the liberties of their subjects in each of their possessions, and, in some of them, to subvert the national institutions.

In the Hereditary States of Austria, the power of the emperor has long been absolute. The strength of Bohemia was broken, and her spirit subdued, by the confiscations and proscriptions that followed upon the defeat of the Protestants, near Prague, in the religious wars of Frederick II.; and for many years her diet has been subservient. Lombardy, the prize of contending armies--German, Spanish, and French--passing from hand to hand, has been regarded as a conquered country; and, with the forms of a popular representation, has been governed as an Austrian province. Hungary alone has preserved her independence and her constitution. But these usurpations were not always injurious to the great body of the people; on the contrary, they were often beneficial. In most of these states, a great part of the population was subject to a dominant class, or nobles, who alone had a share in the government, or possessed constitutional rights, and who exercised an arbitrary jurisdiction over the peasants. The crown, jealous of the power of the aristocracy, afforded the peasants some protection against the oppressions of their immediate superiors. A large body of the people in each state, therefore, saw with satisfaction, or without resentment, the increasing power of the crown, the abridgment of rights and privileges which armed their masters with the power to oppress them, and the subversion of a constitution from which they derived no advantage. If the usurpations of the crown threatened to alienate the nobles, they promised to conciliate the humbler classes.

On the other hand, every noble was a soldier. The wars in which the emperor was engaged, while they forced him occasionally to cultivate the good-will of the aristocracy, on which he was chiefly dependent for his military resources, fostered military habits of submission, and feelings of feudal allegiance to the sovereign. Military service was the road to distinction--military glory the ruling passion. The crown was the fountain of honour, to which all who sought it repaired. A splendid court had its usual attractions; and the nobles of the different races and nations, rivals for the favour of the prince, sought to outdo each other in proofs of devotion to his person and service. Thus it was, that, notwithstanding the usurpations of the emperor, and the resistance they excited, his foreign enemies generally found all classes of his subjects united to defend the dignity of his crown, and the integrity of his dominions.

Still there was nothing to bind together the various parts of this curious fabric, except the accident of allegiance to one sovereign. This was but a precarious bond of union; and the imperial government has, therefore, been unremitting in its efforts to amalgamate the different parts into one whole. The Germans were but a small minority of the emperor's subjects, but the imperial government, the growth of their soil, reflected their mind; and it does not appear to have entered the Austrian mind to conceive that a more intimate union could be accomplished in any other way than by extending the institutions of the Hereditary States to all parts of the empire, and thus ultimately converting the Italians, the Majjars, and the Sclaves, into Austrian Germans.

This policy has been eminently unsuccessful in Hungary, where it has frequently been resisted by force of arms; but its failure is not to be attributed solely to the freedom of the institutions of that country, or to the love of independence, and the feelings of nationality which have been conspicuous in her history. The imperial government, while it resisted the usurpations of the see of Rome in secular matters, asserted its spiritual supremacy with unscrupulous zeal. Every one is acquainted with the history of the Reformation in Bohemia--its early manifestations, its progress, its unsuccessful contests, and its suppression by military force, by confiscations and proscriptions, extending to half the property and the proprietors in that kingdom; but perhaps it is not so generally known, or remembered, that the Majjars early embraced the Reformed doctrines of the school of Calvin, which, even now, when more than half their numbers have become Roman Catholics, is known in Hungary as "the Majjar faith." The history of religious persecution, everywhere a chronicle of misery and crime, has few pages so revolting as that which tells of the persecutions of the Protestants of Hungary, under her Roman Catholic kings of the house of Austria. It was in the name of persecuted Protestantism that resistance to Austrian autocracy was organised; it was not less in defence of their religion than of their liberties that the nation took up arms. Yet there was a time when the Majjars, at least as tenacious of their nationality as any other people in the empire, might perhaps have been Germanised--had certainly made considerable advances towards a more intimate union with Austria. Maria Theresa, assailed without provocation by Prussia--in violation of justice and of the faith of treaties, by France, Bavaria, Saxony, Sardinia, and Spain, and aided only by England and the United Provinces--was in imminent danger of losing the greater part of her dominions. Guided by the instinct of a woman's heart, and yielding to its impulse, she set at naught the remonstrances of her Austrian counsellors, and relied on the loyalty of the Hungarians. Proceeding to Presburg, she appeared at the meeting of the diet, told the assembled nobles the difficulties and dangers by which she was surrounded, and threw herself, her child, and her cause, upon their generosity. At that appeal every sabre leapt from its scabbard, and the shout, "Moriamur pro rege nostro, Maria Theresâ!" called all Hungary to arms. The tide of invasion was rolled back beyond the Alps and the Rhine, and the empire was saved.

"On avait vu," says Montesquieu, "la maison d'Autriche
travailler sans reláche à opprimer la noblesse Hongroise;
elle ignorait de quel prix elle lui serait un jour. Elle
cherchait chez ces peuples de l'argent, qui n'y était pas;
elle ne voyait pas les hommes, qui y étaient. Lorsque tant de
princes partagaient entre eux ces états, toutes les pièces de
la monarchie, immobiles et sans action, tombaient, pour ainsi
dire, les unes sur les autres. Il n'y avait de vie que dans
cette noblesse, qui s'indigna, oublia tout pour combattre, et
cru qu'il était de sa gloire de périr et de pardonner."

The nobles of Hungary had fallen by thousands; many families had been ruined; all had been impoverished by a war of seven years, which they had prosecuted at their private charge; but their queen had not forgotten how much she owed them. She treated them with a kindness more gratifying than the highest distinction; acquired their confidence by confiding in them; taught them to speak the language of her court; made their residence in her capital agreeable to them; promoted alliances between the noble families of Hungary and Austria; obtained from their devotion concessions which her predecessors had failed to extort by force; and prepared the way for a more intimate union between two nations which had hitherto regarded each other with aversion.