A General Sketch of the European War | Page 8

that is what the word "Austria" originally meant) which Christendom erected round the Roman and Christian frontier town of Vienna to withstand the pressure of the heathen Slavs and Mongol Magyars surging against it upon this frontier.
The complexity of the various sections which make up the realm of the present Emperor Francis Joseph, the present head of the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine, would be only confusing if it were detailed in so general a description as this. We must be content with the broad lines of the thing, which are as follows:--
[Illustration: Sketch 3.]
From the Upper Danube and its valley--all the basin of it, one may say, down to a point about twenty miles below Vienna--is the original Austrian State; German-speaking as a whole, and the historic centre of the entire agglomeration. East of this is the far larger state of Hungary, and Hungary is the valley of the river Danube, from where the German-speaking boundary cuts it, just below Vienna down to the Iron Gates, up to the crest of the Carpathians. These two great units of Austria proper and of Hungary have round them certain frills or edges. On the north are two great bodies, Slav in origin, Bohemia and Galicia; on the south another Slav body, separated from the rest for centuries by the eruption of the Magyars from Asia in the Dark Ages, and these Slav bodies are represented by Croatia, by much of Dalmatia, and latterly by Bosnia and Herzegovina, which have been governed by Austria for a generation, and formally annexed by her with the consent of Europe seven years ago. Finally, there is a strip, or, to be more accurate, there are patches of Italian-speaking people, all along the coasts of the Adriatic, and occupying the ports governed by Austria along the eastern and northern coast of that sea. There is also a belt of Alpine territory of Italian speech--the Trentino--still in Austrian hands.
This very general description gives, however, far too rough an idea of the extraordinarily complicated territories of the House of Hapsburg. Thus, there are considerable German-speaking colonies in Hungary, and these, oddly enough, are more frequent in the east than in the west of that State. Again, the whole western slope of the Carpathians is, so far as the mass of the population is concerned, Roumanian in tongue, custom, and race. Bohemia, though Slavonic in origin, is regularly enframed along its four sides by belts of German-speaking people, and was mainly German-speaking until a comparatively recent revival of its native Slavonic tongue, the Czech. Again, though the Magyar language is Mongolian, like the Turkish, centuries of Christian and European admixture have left very little trace of the original race. Lastly, in all the north-eastern corner of this vast and heterogeneous territory, something like a quarter of the population is Jewish.
The Western student, faced with so extraordinary a puzzle of race and language, may well wonder what principle of unity there is lying behind it, and, indeed, this principle of unity is not easy to find.
Some have sought it in religion, pointing out that the overwhelming majority of these various populations are Catholic, in communion with Rome; and, indeed, this Catholic tincture or colour has a great deal to do with the Austro-Hungarian unity; and of late years the chief directing policy of the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine has been to pose as the leader of the Catholic Slavs against the Slavs belonging to the Greek Church.
But this principle of unity is not the true one, for two reasons: first, that the motive leading the House of Hapsburg to the difficult task of so complicated a government is not a religious motive; and, secondly, because this religious unity is subject to profound modification. Hungary, though Catholic in its majority, contains, and is largely governed by, powerful Protestant families, who are supported by considerable bodies of Protestant population. The Greek Church is the religious profession of great numbers along the Lower Danube valley and to the south of the river Save. There are in Bosnia a considerable number of Mahomedans even, and I have already mentioned the numerous Jewish population of the north-east, particularly in Galicia.
The true principle of unity in what has hitherto been the Austro-Hungarian Empire is twofold. It consists, first, in the reigning family, considerable personal attachment to which is felt in every section of its dominions, utterly different as these are one from another; and, secondly (a more important point), in the historical development of the State.
It is this last matter which explains all, and which can make us understand why a realm so astonishingly ill constructed was brought into the present struggle as one force, and that force a force allied to, and in a military sense identical with, modern Prussian Germany.
For the historical root of Austria-Hungary is German.