Henry Wickham Steed

“ Things seemed to be going badly. "It is all the Emperor's fault," said the Austrians. "He lacks energy, he lets the Magyars have everything their own way; he cares nothing for anything; he is too old—in fact he has been Emperor far too long." "The King is not only badly advised, but he is German at heart," said the Magyars. "He is old, and though we may put up with him while he lives, we will not stand his successor. After all, we have nothing to expect from the Habsburgs, who have always betrayed us, and always will. Francis Joseph is no exception to the rule." ”

“ Thus arose the ‘nation of Court counsellors’, a nation artificially begotten by order, at Court, in the Imperial service and in the chanceries—artificial in thought and feeling, nay, even in language, since the Austrian spoken even today in our Government offices and by Jews who desire not to be Jews, is an invention. These men, fashioned from above, have now been for 200 years the pillars of our State and Society. I have called them ‘the nation of Court counsellors’. They are also called ‘the Families’. They are not a nobility. ”

“ People abroad seem to have taken these eulogies at their face value, and to have had no thought for the conditions from which they arose. It was not until Francis Joseph committed the irreparable act which plunged Europe into war that the men and women of our generation remembered the estimate their fathers and grandfathers had formed of him, and began to wonder whether he had changed much after all. ”

“ At every turn, a man is driven back upon himself and forced to probe the reasons for whatever faith may be in him, if he would escape skepticism or save himself from being submerged by the light and lusty, thoughtless and sensuous current of life that swirls around him in Austria. ”

“ Rudolf II. was the first to see whence he could fetch those adaptable beings, devoid of will, out of whom the Hapsburg spirit could create its own men. He sought them among peoples for whom there was no room in the traditional orders and castes; people who were nothing in and by themselves; who could become something only under the Emperor’s hand; people without a real life of their own and whom Imperial favour must first turn into men. They were people of the kind that have sometimes founded colonies and who, in Austria, formed a colony—the colony of the Imperial House. ”

“ The attitude frequently taken up by Francis Joseph towards the administrative oppression of various sections of his subjects constitutes a hard psychological problem. While personally unselfish, generous and just, ever ready to redress a private injury or to alleviate private distress, Francis Joseph as a ruler has often seemed callous to the point of cynicism and 'constitutional' to the point of injustice. ”

“ Undeterred by rumours of a plot against his own life, Amedeo entered Madrid alone, riding at some distance from his suite to the church where Marshal Prim’s body lay in state. His efforts as constitutional king were paralysed by the rivalry between the various Spanish factions, but with the approval of his father he rejected all idea of a coup d’état. ”

“ Thus they and their Emperor earned for a generation the fierce hatred of the Magyars. What gratitude did Francis Joseph show to Russia for her help? Prince Schwarzenberg, the Austrian statesman, declared in advance that Austrian ingratitude would astonish the world. He might have added, in the bitter but veracious words of another Austrian, that “the history of the House of Hapsburg is the history of ingratitude.”
Why, indeed, should the Hapsburgs be grateful? Are their subjects not their personal property? Are they not divinely-appointed to hold sway over the earth? ”

“ The strangeness of this phenomenon whetted my curiosity and led me to study Francis Joseph for myself. Could it be that in Austria-Hungary, as in Ireland, there are "no facts"? The Emperor had surely lived long enough for some of the events of his life and reign to belong to the domain of history. With the help of these and other ascertainable facts it ought surely to be possible to build up something like an accurate opinion of the man. ”

“ The secret of whatever success he attained in his long reign lay in his own devotion to the idea to which he pitilessly sacrificed others—the idea of the divine nature of the Habsburg dynasty and of the divine mission of its head. ”

“ Its history is largely that of the Imperial House, a history not to be explained solely by chronology or by ethnology or in the light of the “Constitutional Rights” which figure so largely in the political demands of the Hapsburg peoples. If Austria-Hungary be regarded as a Sultanate and the Emperor as a Sultan much that seems obscure becomes intelligible. The singular, albeit baffling, charm and interest of Austrian affairs for a Western European, is that they constantly raise what he imagines to be fundamental issues of political and moral phisolophy. ”

“ AMEDEO FERDINANDO MARIA DI SAVOIA, duke of Aosta (1845–1890) , third son of Victor Emmanuel II., king of Italy, and of Adelaide, archduchess of Austria, was born at Turin on the 30th of May 1845. Entering the army as captain in 1859 he fought through the campaign of 1866 with the rank of major-general, leading his brigade into action at Custozza and being wounded at Monte Torre. In May 1867 he married the princess Maria Carlotta del Pozzo della Cisterna. ”

“ The way our people, lively, easy-going, variable, dance up to all things with verve and grace, is like a rosy children’s ball. But note well that, in all this South German liveliness and Slavonic changeability, in all this rapid whirl of persons, the thing itself remains Asiatically stiff, inert, conservative, sphinx-dead and spectrally hoary, not having budged an inch for ages. ”

“ In fact, the Austrian clergy is one of the least religious bodies of ecclesiastics in the world, just as the Austrian people, while outwardly very observant of religious form, is very void of religious feeling. Immorality is proverbial both among the homebred clergy and the people. There are strongly Catholic provinces in Austria where the illegitimate birth-rate is 40 per cent of the total birth-rate; and the true history—as known to the Vatican—of some of the great monasteries in recent years would cause the salacious novels of the Middle Ages to appear bowdlerized. ”

“ Whoever serves and helps them does but his plain duty and should rejoice in the consciousness of rightful service well done.
When, five years later, Russia became involved in the Crimean War, not only did Austria lend her no help but, after a period of vacillation, actually joined England, France, and Sardinia against Russia. Similarly, when in 1867 Francis Joseph finally came to terms with the Magyars after the defeat of Sadowa, he handed over to the tender mercies of the Magyars, the Roumanes, Slovaks and Croats who had stood by him in his hour of trouble. ”

“ There are nobles among them and burghers among them; one can gain admittance to them from all quarters—on one condition: those who would enter, must break with their class, deny their race, denationalize themselves. ”

“ That is why the most daring novelties come easier to us than to other States—because they are only new names. Freedom of the press and confiscations, Ministerial responsibility and violations of the constitution, the Concordat with the Pope and an anti-clerical middle-class government—we can stand them all!. ”