Political Considerations of Vienna Period
alted company without having risen from their own ranks. On principle they want to keep things among themselves, and they hate as their common enemy every mind which might be a figure one among the zeros. In this respect their instinct is the more acute, the less it exists in any other direction.
The result is an ever-spreading intellectual impoverishment of the governing classes. The result for state and nation can easily be judged by anyone who does not himself belong among this sort of “leaders.”
Old Austria had parliamentary government in its purest form. The prime ministers, were, it is true, appointed by the Emperor and King, but even this appointment was merely the carrying out of the will of Parliament; and the trading and haggling for individual ministerial posts was Western Democracy of the first water. The results were worthy of the principles employed. Replacement of individual personalities, in particular, took place at shorter and shorter intervals, to become at last a regular mad chase. At the same time the stature of the successive “statesmen” shrank, until only parliamentary jugglers remained—the petty-type whose value as statesmen was judged more and more by their ability to glue together the various coalitions, that is to carry out the tiny political deals which alone can make one of these peoples’ representatives fit for practical work.
Vienna was a school offering the best of insights in this field.
I was no less interested to compare these popular representatives’ actual knowledge and ability with the tasks which awaited them. To do so it was necessary, whether one would or no, to concern oneself with the intellectual horizon of these chosen of the people; and then one was obliged to give some attention to the processes leading to the discovery of these mangnificent figures in our public life. The fashion in which these gentlemen put their actual ability to work for the Fatherland—the technical course of their activity, that is,—also deserved thorough examination and study.
The more one determined to get at these internal conditions, to study persons and factual foundations with ruthless objec-
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