Franz Joseph Land

“ The bear and fox are the only land mammals; insects are rare; but the avifauna is of interest, and the Jackson expedition distinguished several new species.
August Petermann expressed the opinion that Baffin may have sighted the west of Franz Josef Land in 1614, but the first actual discovery is due to Julius Payer, a lieutenant in the Austrian army, who was associated with Weyprecht in the second polar expedition fitted out by Count Wilczek on the ship “Tegetthof” in 1872. On the 13th of August 1873, the “Tegetthof” being then beset, high land was seen to the north-west. ”

“ It took an army of 200,000 men, with 480 guns, to pacify that little strip of land; and the occupation, and the subsequent events in the peninsula, [159] have brought Austria up against another problem, uncommonly like the old one which disturbed the beginning of Francis Joseph’s reign. For the inhabitants of Bosnia are of Servian race; and there are many other Servians in other parts of the Austrian dominions; and there is a Kingdom of Servia, full of fiercely patriotic men, from whom the cry of Servia Irredenta is going up. Austria once despised them, as she once despised the Italians ”

“ If the strong hand was a bloody hand, the bloody hand was a strong hand; and Austria did not “muddle through” her difficulties, but carved her way through them. She had nothing as yet to fear from Prussia; she strode with jack-boots through Hungary and northern Italy; and the House of Habsburg—bankrupt, but with the most effective army in Europe—could once more afford to be arrogant. So that we find Francis Joseph, as soon as his position was secure, manifesting his family pride by a proposal that Napoleon III. should be insulted. ”

“ The descriptions of the land of Joseph, given in these two chapters, together with the other passages of Holy Writ, show that the land of Joseph was no less than the Western Hemisphere, known to us as North and South America. It is well known that the tribes of Israel occupied the promised land from generation to generation, until through apostasy and transgression nearly all the tribes were carried into captivity long before the advent of the Messiah. When He came the land was occupied chiefly by the tribe of Judah, which was subsequently scattered among the various nations of the earth. ”

“ Over this fertile, favored, and civilized nation Joseph reigned,--with delegated power indeed, but with power that was absolute,--when his starving brothers came to Egypt to buy corn, for the famine extended probably over western Asia. He is to be viewed, not as a prophet, or preacher, or reformer, or even a warrior like Moses, but as a merely executive ruler. As the son-in-law of the high-priest of Hieropolis, and delegated governor of the land, in the highest favor with the King, and himself a priest, it is probable that Joseph was initiated into the esoteric wisdom of the priesthood. ”

“ At any rate, in this country, there is an amiable disposition to regard Franz Josef as a victim rather than an accomplice, a weakling writhing beneath the jack-boot of Prussia, impotent to hold his own. It may not be so. Time alone will reveal the truth. ”

“ And we ourselves and also our land shall be thine, buy us into bondship and servitude of the king, and give us seed to sow lest the earth turn into wilderness. Then Joseph bought all the land of Egypt, every man selling his possessions for the vehement hunger that they had. He subdued all unto Pharaoh, and all his people from the last terms of Egypt unto the utterest ends of the same, except the land longing to the priests, which was given to them by the king, to whom were given victuals openly out of all the barns and garners, and therefore they were not compelled to sell their possessions. ”

“ Up to 1866 its ambition was to be the head of the entire German nation, of which the Hapsburg territories were to form an integral part. When the Prussian kings supplanted the rulers of Austria in the leadership of Germany, Francis Joseph hesitated for a while and was on the verge of making his empire a federal structure with equal rights for all races, but instead of that he put into effect a compromise by means of which he pacified the Magyars and sacrificed all the rest. He divided his empire into two parts. ”

“ Joseph haughtily replied that he had not come to talk about land; the maker of the earth had not partitioned it off, and man should not; the earth was his mother, sacred to his affections, and too precious to be sold. He did not wish to learn farming, but to live upon such fruits as the earth produced for him without effort. (From these principles Joseph has never departed. To this day (1898) he and his little band on the Colville reservation refuse to take up the arts of peace. They hunt and fish, and dwell in tepees.) ”

“ The Emperor Franz Josef is probably as thoroughly beloved by his subjects as any sovereign in history has ever been. His great misfortunes—fearful defeats in the wars with France and Germany, the suicide of his only son, the assassination of his wife, and family troubles in more recent times—have thrown about him an atmosphere of romantic sympathy; while love for his kindly qualities is mingled with respect for his plain common sense. During his stay in Berlin I met him a second time. At my first presentation at Dresden, two years before, there was little opportunity for extended conversation ”

“ In 1778 he commanded the troops collected to oppose Frederick, who supported the rival claimant to Bavaria. Real fighting was averted by the unwillingness of Frederick to embark on a new war and by Maria Theresa’s determination to maintain peace. In April 1780 he paid a visit to Catherine of Russia, against the wish of his mother.
The death of Maria Theresa on the 27th of November 1780 left Joseph free. He immediately directed his government on a new course, full speed ahead. He proceeded to attempt to realize his ideal of a wise despotism acting on a definite system for the good of all. ”

“ Maria Theresa shook her head. "I cannot believe that we are justifies in annexing to Austria an electorate which, not being ours by indisputable right of inheritance, may be the cause of involving us in a bloody war."
"But which, nevertheless, is the finest province in all Germany," cried Joseph impatiently; "and its acquisition the first step toward consolidation of all the German principalities into one great empire. When the Palatinate, Suabia, and Lower Bavaria are ours, the Danube will flow through Austrian territory alone; the trade of the Levant becomes ours ”

“ Joseph began life in the office of the court bankers and army contractors of his family at Vienna. Here it was that he obtained his first ideas of how [Pg 274] money could be raised through lotteries, monopolies,and imposts of all kinds. But though Joseph was put on the road that led to wealth, in the Oppenheim house at Vienna, he missed his chance there, and was dismissed for some misconduct or other, the particulars of which we do not know.
Then, in disgrace and distress, he came to Bavaria, where he served a while as barber's assistant. ”

“ My brother Joseph replied, that he did not know what good he could do in any consultation, as he was only a private individual: however, he said that he was always willing to do all the good he could, and would obey every law of the land, and then leave the event with God. They immediately started with Col. Hinkle to go down into the camp. As they were going down, about half way to the camp, they met General Lucas with a phalanx of men, with a wing to the right and to the left, and a four-pounder in the center. ”

“ For a brief moment in 1848 the Parliament of Kremsier laid down the fundamental law, “All power proceeds from the people,” and the Czech leader Dr. Rieger expounded this theme in one of his best speeches. But ever since this short-lived child of the revolution was dismissed and its home occupied by Austrian soldiers, each successive constitution in Austria has been not a democratic achievement, but the personal gift of Francis Joseph, designed as a cloak for theocratic monarchism, which claims to possess superhuman and divine rights. ”

“ Bereft of his beautiful wife, the son he idolized, the brother he himself unknowingly sent to his destruction, Francis Joseph of Austria is at once the most solitary and indomitable personality among the rulers of the world today. Never, through all his misfortunes, has his iron pride given way to complaint or regret ”

“ During the disturbances of 1848, Francis Joseph spent some time in Italy, where, under Radetzky, at the battle of St Lucia, he had his first experience of warfare. At the end of that year, after the rising of Vienna and capture of the city by Windischgrätz, it was clearly desirable that there should be a more vigorous ruler at the head of the empire, and Ferdinand, now that the young archduke was of age, was able to carry out the abdication which he and his wife had long desired. ”

“ The two speeches sound like the last lingering echoes of mediævalism; and Francis Joseph, in spite of the successive shocks which experience has given him, probably retains more mediæval ideas than any other contemporary ruler. The superiority of the Habsburgs to the rest of mankind—at all events, of Austrian mankind—is not, for him, a proposition which needs to be demonstrated; it is a law of thought. He does not argue about it, or expect others to argue about it, but finds it in his consciousness together with his conceptions of space and time. ”

“ At the same time, and in order to paralyze any desire on the part of Francis Joseph to come to the aid of France, he mobilized both the Hungarian Government and the Austrian Liberals to compel Francis Joseph to dismiss his anti-Prussian Austrian Premier, Count Hohenwart, to break his promises to the Bohemians, and to surrender himself for the rest of his reign to the joint control of the Magyar minority in Hungary and the German minority in Austria. ”

“ He now made Beust, Bismarck’s Saxon antagonist, the head of his government, as the result of whose negotiations with Deák the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 was agreed upon. A law was passed by the Hungarian diet regularizing the abdication of Ferdinand; at the beginning of June Francis Joseph signed the inaugural diploma and took the oath in Magyar to observe the constitution; on the 8th he was solemnly crowned king of Hungary. The traditional coronation gift of 100,000 florins he assigned to the widows and orphans of those who had fallen in the war against Austria in 1849. ”

“ In a word, the German has succeeded agriculturally through the more and more perfect functioning, in this new land, of qualities imparted by the training and inheritance which he brought with him from the old world. On the whole, Germans have kept clear of speculation, preferring to invest their savings in neighboring lands with which they were intimately familiar, or to lend to neighboring farmers on farm mortgage security. In the aggregate, German farmers in Wisconsin have long had vast sums at interest. ”

“ The Habsburgs can be traced back to the seventh century before we lose them in the crowd of common men. The branch of the family to which the Emperor Francis Joseph belongs is that known as the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, founded by the marriage of the Empress Maria Theresa to Francis, Duke of Lorraine, in 1736; and the House of Lorraine has an independent genealogy, only less ancient and illustrious than that of Habsburg itself, being descended, through the House of Anjou, from Hugues Capet, the ancestor of the royal house of France. ”

“ Austria, long a by-word among the Jews as a house of bondage, established an era of toleration under the philosophical monarch Joseph II., who, soon after the appearance of293 Dohm’s work, abolished many of the imposts paid by the children of Israel, granted them permission to pursue all arts and sciences, trades and handicrafts, admitted them to the universities and academies, founded and endowed Jewish schools, and, in pursuance of his futile plan to secure internal harmony by the Germanisation of the various races of his Empire, he made the study of German compulsory on all Jewish adults. ”

“ In the strength of this blessing, the tribe of Joseph would attain to such a development of power, that it would be able to tread down all nations.
Verse 17Verse 17
“The first-born of his ox, majesty is to him, and buffalo-horns his horns: with them he thrusts down nations, all at once the ends of the earth. These are the myriads of Ephraim, and these the thousands of Manasseh.” The “first-born of his (Joseph's) oxen” (shor, a collective noun, as in Deu 15:19) is not Joshua (Rabb., Schultz) ”

“ As the answer of the children of Joseph indicated cowardice and want of confidence in the help of God, Joshua contented himself with repeating his first reply, though more fully and with the reasons assigned. “Thou art a strong people, and hast great power; there will not be one lot to thee:” i.e., because thou art a numerous people and endowed with strength, there shall not remain one lot to thee, thou canst and wilt extend thine inheritance. ”

“ Born, as the young redskin was, of princely stock, he might, with such an advantage, be expected to attain to honour and dignity among the people of the Long House. There was, however, one obstacle; although Joseph's father was a chief, he did not inherit rank, for it was the custom of the Six Nations to trace descent through the blood of the mother, and his mother, who had brought him over hill and water from the banks of the Ohio, was of humble origin. ”