THE AUSTRIAN CONCORDAT, THE EMPEROR, AND THE POPE.
HE must be indeed an extraordinarily blase individual who cannot find the present aspect of the Old World suffi- ciently exciting to awake his interest. At every point Europe teems literally with fermentation. There is not a State in it but is felt to be full of inflammable materials,—to be impreg- nated with spasmodic elements,—requiring for explosion only some conjunction that under existing circumstances is visibly but too likely to come about. Positively, the atmosphere is thick to the senses with atoms of disturbance in every quarter,—so thick for once that it is an age since we have been able to come across the cheerful phenomena of the optimist who still maintains that all is blue and serene in the political firmament overhead. Trustfulness in the future has long given way to suspense and anxiety, for in every direction the horizon is plainly beset with angry weatherbanks. What adds to all this uneasiness is that human perspicacity cannot possibly, at this precise moment, forecast the actual course of things. All it can do, with some degree of accuracy, is to observe the particular character of the various angry elements that are being piled up. Many are easily enough ascertained. No difference of opinion can exist as to what constitutes the substance of the antagonism between Imperial France and Germany, any more than as to what is involved in the antagonism between the forces of Russia and Turkey. But in exact relation to the definiteness of antagonisms is the definiteness of the issues they can give rise to. What we must be pre- pared for in these instances are wars more or less desperate between these forces, if ever they should unfortunately come to meet at the point of angry heat ; but though wars of incalculable magnitude and incalculable destructiveness, as waged by State against State, and well defined nationality against equally well defined nationality, yet the mode and scope of their operations can be gauged to some degree. There is no inherent cause why these shocks should be socially as well as politically revolutionary. There is no reason why these should convulse the organization as well as the con- figuration of the communities engaged. But such a thorough convulsion seems quite within the probable com- pass of what lies involved in the play of forces now at work in Austria. On the whole Continent no State pre- sents a spectacle at all comparable in real interest to that which is presented by what once was the Empire of the Haps- burghs, but at this moment is only a loose aggregation of populations dimly and vaguely groping their way to social and political reconstruction.
Since the French Revolution, Europe has looked on no more momentous and complicated undertakings than those taken in hand by the populations till the other day the sub- ject of an empire of renown, but now cast adrift to find a new foothold of their own. For let it not be fancied that because Francis Joseph has been lustily cheered by the Hun- garians as their King, and has had bonfires lit in his honour by the Viennese in their transitory rapture at a slap given to the Church to which he was prematurely believed to be faithful, therefore, the Empire is being cemented. On the contrary, what has just happened at Vienna, and is still happening in the Royal Palace in Buda, so far from proving the feasibility of effecting a practical fusion of the old Empire in a new and better fashion, must carry conviction to every mind not dimmed sanguine zeal that the problems at issue are most difficult of solution; at least, unless something very like a miraculous change should come over the nature and intellects of the Hapsburghs. The popular element is in the ascendant in the two portions of the Austrian Empire. It is quite possible that this element may in the end lose itself in a reaction, the natural result of its own unwise action. But such turn of the tide is not yet at hand, nor are there any signs thereof, and before it does come, if this should ever be so, the popular feeling will have made itself felt with increasing force on what to the Austrian people is their special bogie,—but to the Hapsburghs generally, and to Francis Joseph particularly, is an object of worship, an ineradicable article of faith—just as Much as the divine right of Kings was to a Stuart—the Church as a privileged institution. We say deliberately that what has just occurred and still is occurring on this head conveys the evidence of how hopeless is the task which Baron Beast has rashly pledged himself to, the reconstruction of Aus- tria on a popular basis, with so thoroughly weak a reed to lean on for his chief prop as the Emperor Francis Joseph. That much noise should have been made abroad about the vote adopted. in the Austrian Reichsrath for so insignificant a measure as the establishment of a machinery for optional civil registra- tion of marriages is not marvellous, when we find Vienna cheering itself hoarse at the result. It always happens at the opening of great revolutions, that the people begin like children by being taken off their legs with joy at a trifle. What is significant is that this trifle—which some months hence the people will no longer think worth consideration— has already seemed to an august Imperial intellect a matter of such mighty import, that before assenting thereto he has to get the better of a stern internal struggle. For that this surely is the case, cannot be concealed by any amount of officious or official explanation. Francis Joseph has been frightened for his soul when called upon to give his sovereign sanction to what is but the first step in a course of legislative action against the Church upon which his people are absolutely determined.
It is somewhat perplexing to discriminate between the contradictory statements that tumble in upon us in quick succession, as to the actual state of the case in the matter of a legislative revision of the Concordat. It is evident that some powerful parties are busily engaged in trying to throw dust of their own making in people's eyes,—the dust so raised being composed of studied assurances as to the complete accord between the Emperor and the Pope, as to the modifications in the Concordat that are requisite to satisfy the popular desire. The most curious and elaborate of these attempts at blinding the public, is one that has been made through the channel of the Journal des Debuts. In a correspondence from Vienna which the editors of that journal introduce with an explanatory statement that its source must impart special value to the information, we are furnished with detailed data as to the happy coalition between the Emperor and the Pope to gratify the popular demand. According to this oracular correspondent the Vatican perfectly recognizes the wants of the age, and is ready to meet the proposals of the Austrian Government in a spirit of sur- prising liberality. In short, we are asked to believe that Baron Beust, Francis Joseph, and Pius IX. are pulling together cordially and successfully in a reforming co-partner- ship. This certainly is diametrically contrary to all we learn from sources we have every reason. to believe in, although we think we can quite understand the motive that is likely to have suggested the dissemination of such incorrect state- ments. Baron Beast is a clever,. but a very sanguine and in many respects a very reckless statesman. Moreover, he is a Protestant by birth and education, and as a Protestant he approaches the Vatican, contemplates its nature, and mis- understands it. He has been fooling himself with the notion —and many are the politicians who have done the same— that the Pope could be amenable to reasonings based on grounds of prudence and secular expediency. He actually has been pursuing the will-o'-the-wisp notion that the Court of Rome would act as a reasonable human creature might be
expected to act when called on to do so in conjunction with one known to be a friend. Baron Beust had never realized to himself what Lamennais calls the high-principled ingratitude of the Court of Rome to its friends—an ingratitude based on the conception that whatever it conceded to human friends must be so much deducted from the Church. It does not seem as if even at this hour he had taken-in the fullness of this intense stiffneckedness, or he would desist from the puerile trick of putting forth rosy coloured statements that are quite un- founded, solely because his sanguine temperament still believes that in the end he will succeed in making the impression he wishes. No doubt Baron Beust finds himself somewhat in a cleft stick, for his plausible self-confidence in his own power to persuade the Pope has materially tended to hoodwink the slender intelligence of the Emperor, who really thought he was assured of a Papal licence, until of a sudden he finds himself brought up opposite a sharp monition from the Holy Father, and a not less sharp measure of his Reichsrath, that calls for his sovereign assent. As yet no resolution has been actually taken, and it would appear that recourse is being had to the kind of appeals weak minds are naturally disposed to in difficult moments. The Emperor is beseech- ing the Pope through private channels, and seeking to move his heart with piteous cries. On the other hand, Baron Beust, who has before now had experience of the inefficiency or unwillingness of his official agents in Rome to speak the sort of language which his Protestant nature would have no hesitation in uttering to the Pope, and who, in consequence, has had already to dismiss one Ambassador because he would not carry out his instructions, seems now about to de- spatch—if we are to believe the latest telegram—Baron Meysenburg to supplement the zeal and spirit of Count Crivelli. We do not expect that this announced supplemen- tary embassy will produce much effect on the temper of Pius IX. or Antonelli. "Non possunius" is all the answer that will be given, though every diplomatist in the service, and even every Archduke in the House of Hapsburgh go on their knees before the Pope, so that Francis Joseph will have to make up his mind either to act in this matter without the Papal sanction, or to face the consequences of rejecting the vote of the Reichsrath. We do not contemplate that he will do this. On this occasion Francis Joseph will yield to popular feeling, for he is too little intelligent to understand the real situation —the current that has set in—and he will believe that the concession, in itself insignificant, is all that will be demanded of the Crown. But in this he is likely soon to find himself much mistaken, and then will arise difficulties out of his narrow scruples of conscience which it is more easy to descry, than to see how they are likely to be overcome by so prejudiced and narrow-minded a monarch.
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