A General Sketch of the European War | Page 8

the
international activity of Prussia in the future? What part especially was
she to play when Prussia, at the head of Northern Germany, should go
out to impose the will of that Germany and of herself upon the rest of
the world? That is the next question we must answer before we can
hope to understand the causes of the present war in their entirety.
(4) AUSTRIA.
Austria, or, more strictly speaking, the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
means no more than the congeries of States governed each separately
and all in combination by the head of the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine.
Of these various States only one is German-speaking as a whole, and
that is the Austrian State proper, the "Eastern States" (for 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