THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
safety, which was to consist principally of the members of the students' organization. So independent and so comprehensive a power was confided to it that in several important respects it stood by the side of the ministry as co-ordinate. Without its consent, for instance, no military force should be employed in the city. Thus it might have been said without much exaggeration that for a certain time the students of Vienna governed Austria.
It was, therefore, not astonishing that the Viennese legionaries, who had already made so much history, were among us regarded as the heroes of the day, and that with eager attention we listened to their reports about the condition of things in their country. Those reports, however, opened a prospect of further serious troubles if not of a tragical end, and of this our Viennese friends were sadly conscious. They knew that the victories of the Austrian Field Marshal Radetzki in Italy over Carlo Alberto, the king of Piedmont, would give Austria's army new prestige and the reactionary court-party new power; that this court-party systematically inflamed and used the Czechs against the Germans in Austria; that the presence in the capital of the constituent assembly, the convocation of which the students themselves had asked for, would greatly impair the power of the revolutionary authorities; that in the civic guards and in the committee of public safety mischievous dissensions had broken out; that the court-party derived from all these things great advantage and would avail itself of the first favorable opportunity to sweep away the fruits of the revolution in general, and to suppress the students' organization in particular, and that the decisive struggle would come soon.
These presentiments sometimes fell like dark shadows upon our otherwise so jovial conviviality, and it required all
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