Austria in Extremis.
Published: May 12, 1860
While England and Switzerland are wasting their precious time in futile attempts to impress the great Powers with the enormous importance to the "balance of power" of the annexation of Savoy to France, events of quite another significance are rapidly ripening in the East of Europe.
The condition of Austria at the present moment is not less threatening in itself, though less alarming for the peace of the world, than was the condition of Turkey when the Czar NICHOLAS invited England to draw up with him the last will and testament of the "sick man of Europe." It is, indeed, hardly within the range of probability that another twelvemonth should pass over the House of HAPSBURG without bringing upon the Austrian Empire a catastrophe unmatched in modern history since the downfall of Poland.
The suicide of Baron BRUCK, the ablest practical statesman of the realm, -- the only man high in the Imperial confidence who can be said to have comprehended in the least degree the actual financial state of the monarchy, the spirit of the present age, and the policy which that spirit imposes upon all Governments which do not mean to dash themselves in pieces; the man whom Prince FELIX SCHWARZENBERG on his death-bed implored FRANCIS JOSEPH to maintain against all the intrigues of the Aristocracy and the Army, saying, "there is but one man in Austria who can save your Imperial house, and BRUCK is that one man," -- the suicide of this devoted, able, and, as for a time he had seemed to be, successful Minister, has struck the people of Vienna, we are told, into a kind of dumb and abject despair. Nor without reason. The death of Baron BRUCK may well darken the heavens over Vienna, as the cloud of ashes rising from Vesuvius turned the noon to midnight over Pompeii on the day of its doom. For whatever may have been the real motive of that sudden and fearful deed, it reveals the absolute wreck of the financial organization of the Austrian Empire.
The Imperial journals assert that the unhappy Minister slew himself because he had been discovered to be the centre and life of a gigantic system of defalcation pervading every department of the public service; running back through the five years of his active primacy in the financial affairs of Austria; implicating functionaries of all ranks, and stretching over the whole empire, from the Lagunes of Venice to the mouths of the Danube. To fortify this charge, we learn that the intimate friends of the fallen man, the heads of the commercial class throughout Austria, the great bankers and merchants of the Empire, are everywhere undergoing examination at the hands of the Imperial authorities -- examinations prosecuted with every circumstance of indignity and violence. The patricians and the generals are in the ascendant, and are everywhere avenging the odious triumphs of the statesman who dared to rise from the station of a Government clerk to the ear of the Emperor and the keys of the treasury; upon the order to which he belonged, and which he had done more than any other man in Austria to elevate into consideration, and to clothe with some small share of the influence which, for Austria's sake, he saw that it must be allowed to wield, if the Empire was to live, and move, and have any being in the nineteenth century.
Granting the truth of this version of BRUCK's tragical story, it involves the hopeless prostration of every power in Austria but the will of the Sovereign and the word of the soldier; a will that was humbled at Solferino and a word that was broken at Villafranca,.
From other quarters we hear that Baron BRUCK, like a much greater and nobler man, Count SZECHENYI, the patriarch of Hungarian progress, took his life in sheer despair at the madness of a Government bent on its own destruction and the ruin of the nation cursed with its sway. Accept which interpretation we may of the catastrophe, it is for Austria one word more in that dread writing on the wall which, for the last eighteen months, has been slowly kindling into lurid prophecy before the eyes of the world. The vacillating policy of FRANCIS JOSEPH proves that, blind and obstinate as he is, even he begins to pale before these signs of the times. He has humbled himself to Hungary, and is endeavoring to propitiate Prussia. Were he to beg the Venetians to oblige him by electing their own Doges, he could not more clearly betray the terror which is invading the walls of Schoenbrunn. But Hungary, cheated and scourged for ten weary years into a keener-eyed and more resolute nationality than ever, refuses the hand that is extended to her, not to raise herself, but to steady her tottering tyrant. And the popular party in Prussia, headed by the eloquent and far-sighted VON VINCKE, openly demands a reconstitution of the German Empire, from which Austria shall be excluded. The HAPSBURGS have worn out, not only the patience of the races which they have so long oppressed, but the faith of the race to which they themselves belong. They stand alone in Europe. The nationality of Germany, struggling to assert itself, will admit them into its circle only as members, never again as leaders. The nationality of Hungary, chastised by them into wisdom, awaits but the apt moment to shake them off forever, and assume itself that station in Eastern Europe which Austria might, under other princes, have held for ages yet to come. The nationality of Italy stands at their side, ready, armed and eager to strike down the last Austrian standard that floats upon the shore of the Adriatic; and sure, in doing so, not only of the acquiescence, but of the applause, of Europe and of the world. The work of 1859 is fulfilling itself with a certainty and a speed upon which even its author can hardly have counted.