Political Considerations of Vienna Period
the narrow limits of his homeland. The German-Austrian recruit might join a German regiment, but the regiment itself was as likely to be stationed in Herzegovina as in Vienna or Galicia. The officers were still Germans, and the higher civil servants predominantly so. And finally, art and science were German. Aside from the trash of more recent art, which, after all could be easily done by a race of negroes, the Germans alone possessed and propagated a true feeling for art. In music, architecture, sculpture and painting Vienna was the fountain head whose inexhaustible wealth supplied the whole Dual Monarchy, without itself apparently ever running low.
Germans, finally, were the pillar of all foreign policy, if we except a numerically small body of Hungarians.
Nevertheless every attempt to preserve the Empire was futile, since the most essential prerequisite was lacking.
For the Austrian state of peoples there was only one possible way of overcoming the centrifugal forces of the individual nations. The state had to be centrally governed, and organized internally for that purpose, or it would be no more.
At occasional lucid moments this truth was realized even in “All-Highest” quarters, but usually only to be soon forgotten or set aside as too difficult to carry through. Every thought of a more federative development of the Empire was bound to go wrong because there was no strong state germ cell of dominant authority. Besides, the internal situation of the Austrian state was very different from that of the German Empire as Bismarck shaped it. In Germany it was only a question of overcoming political traditions, since a common cultural basis was always there. Above all, Germany, aside from small alien fragments, was made up of only one people.
In Austria the situation was reversed. Here, except for Hungary, the individual countries had no political memory of their own grandeur, or it had been rubbed out by the sponge of time, or it was, at least, faint and confused. Now came the age of the nationality principle, and in the various countries popular forces developed which were increasingly difficult to overcome as na-
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