Political Considerations of Vienna Period
ment were closely related. The Pan-Germans did not understand the inner driving forces of great upheavals, and thus made too low an estimate of the importance of the great masses of people; hence their slight interest in the social question, hence their inadequate attempts to capture the soul of the lower levels of the nation, and hence their attitude toward Parliament, which could only increase their inadequacy.
If they had realized the enormous power always inherent in the masses as the mainstay of revolutionary resistance, they would have gone to work differently in social and propaganda matters. The chief emphasis of the movement would have been put not on Parliament but on factory and street.
Even their third mistake had its germ in the fact that they did not recognize the value of the masses which, like a flywheel, originally set in motion in a given direction by superior intellects, lend impetus and consistent tenacity to the attack.
The hard struggle which the Pan-German movement carried on with the Catholic Church can be explained only by its insufficient understanding of the people’s spiritual nature.
The causes of the new party’s violent attack upon Rome were as follows:
When the House of Hapsburg had finally decided to transform Austria into a Slavic state, it resorted to every means which seemed at all suited to the purpose. This most conscienceless of ruling houses even unscrupulously put religious institutions to work for the new “state idea.”
Employment of Czech pastorates and their spiritual shepherds was but one of the many means used to attain the purpose, a general Slavicization of Austria.
The process took place something like this:
In purely German parishes, Czech pastors were installed, who slowly but surely began to place the interests of the Czech people above the interests of the churches, and became focal points of infection in the de-Germanization process.
Faced with these tactics the German clergy, unfortunately, were almost a total failure. Not only were they completely use-
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