THE DISTURBANCES IN VIENNA.
THE theorists who assert that the ultimate cause of discon- tent in great cities is the difficulty of obtaining land, should, if they are thinkers, and not mere agitators, study the situation now existing in Vienna and Paris. The land difficulty in Austria may be pronounced absolutely non-existent. Any one may obtain any amount at exceedingly low prices. The late Mr. Boner, who had a profound knowledge of Austrian economics, and for some time managed the huge estates of the Schwarzen- berg family, used to say that the root of Austrian financial troubles was the valuelessness of land, that everybody had too much ; and though matters have altered a little since his time, the change has not been great. Nevertheless, the distress in Vienna is so considerable, and the spread of Socialistic ideas so rapid, that the Emperor has felt compelled to depart from the steady policy of his family, and risk a quarrel with the Viennese. Not only has he authorised the minor state of siege, under which the rights of printing, speaking, and public meeting are abrogated, but he has also suspended trial by jury,
on the distinct ground that when a criminal pleads the social quarrel as his excuse, a verdict cannot be obtained from the Viennese. It is easy, of course, to say that this is a pretext, and that Count Taaffe is reactionary ; but, in the first place, that is a misde- scription of the Minister, and in the second, the Emperor on serious questions is still the pivot of power, and an order sure to irritate the people in the very centre of whom he lives, would not have been issued without his sanction. We may be sure that he has only acted on information, although his method may be a mistake, and certainly the known facts warrant some misgiving. The English, when they visit Vienna, come in contact with the gentle, pleasant-mannered South Germans, as little criminal as any civilised people, and for the most part not discontented ; but Vienna is a sink of all the races of the Empire, full of half-civilised, fierce men, who can when distress sets in be as dangerous as any people in the world. Nowhere are crimes more savage, or criminals more callous. A hatred of the police, too, has grown up, and whether juries can be trusted or not, it is quite evident that legal evidence when policemen are the victims is most difficult to obtain. Scores must know perfectly well who the murderer of Brock is. Vienna, in fact, is for the moment in the position of Dublin, and the Emperor resorts to a Coercion Act. Unfortunately, that will do him little good. Insurrection is impossible in the face of that immense Army, with regiments often foreign to the citizens they control ; but the distress is real, and while it lasts order will not be complete. The rebuilding of Vienna has ended, she suffers like every other city from the slackness of trade and the fall in speculative securities, and the workmen out of employ have no Poor-law to fall back on. They may starve, or if bread is distributed by the Municipality and the charit- able societies, they may be evicted ; and consequently they foam against the social system," which, in Vienna, with its luxurious upper class, is an unusually provoking one. For some years past the Emperor has been personally the safest monarch in Europe, ex- cept the King of Sweden ; but if the discontent spread, it may yet be necessary to guard him like his brother of Berlin. Despite the cheapness of land, the rush of labour to the capital, with its higher wages, brighter life, and more numerous chances, has produced congestion, and the precipitate which the stream of humanity deposits, the residuum which can get no income, grows by rapid degrees first hungry, then desperate, then, individually or collectively, insurgent.
Almost the same condition of things exists in Paris. In France, population does not increase, would, indeed, but for immigration, diminish—the country now contains more than a million of born Italians, Spaniards, and Germans—and seven- tenths of the people are known to possess property in land or Rentes. Subdivision could hardly be carried farther, yet the rash upon Paris is overwhelming. Multitudes of the workmen are covered by roofs, rather than housed ; and whenever trade slackens each of the great businesses throws off thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of workers, to shift without wages as they can. The building trade has been overdone, and is stopping, and 30,000 masons and masons' assistants demand help ; the demand for furniture has grown less, and 10,000 joiners are in the streets ; Europe is tired of articles de Paris," and buys them from Vienna and Birmingham—Mr. Chamberlain's electors, for instance, have killed the Parisian manufacture of false ornaments—and 5,000 adroit workers in metal expect eviction. Innumerable petty trades which
minister to luxury—for example, carriage-builders—are suf- fering also ; while the catastrophe of the chiffonniers, who have been literally reduced to starvation by the order of a Prefect intent either on cleanliness or jobbery, or both, has exasperated 30,000 people as free of civilisation as the nomads. It has been necessary to have days of debate in the Chamber on the "economic condition of Paris," a strong repressive law is coming down from the Senate, and though M. Ferry speaks cheerily, and feels safe under the protection of the troops, he will be compelled to keep the people alive, and will, it is stated, resort to the old and wretched expedient,—that of ordering more buildings and furniture on account of the State. Nothing, in fact, is more distressing in these occurrences than the failure of Continental statesmen to meet them with any original or effective plan. Prince Bismarck, under stress of Socialist hostility, has, indeed, proposed to relieve the poor from direct taxes, and is reaping a certain reward in proletariat favour—the workmen delegates from all Prussia, who met in Congress last week, have unanimously approved his plans—but he has only tried what has been tried in England for years past, and his Protectionist fallacies intensify distress. Count Taaffe, in Vienna, apparently relies upon repression alone, though he may be silently compelling workmen to return to their villages ; and the French Chamber has not an idea in it. The Reds, it is true, do ask for Government workshops, that is, for a crude and unworkable form of Poor-law; but neither M. Ferry nor M. Clemenceau has a permanent plan for meeting the permanent danger. Queen Elizabeth's advisers had, though she lived three hundred years ago, and their plan, bad as it was in some respects, prevented social revolu- tion. M. Ferry utters the sternest maxims, and refuses to acknowledge the obligation of the State to feed the people ; but when it comes to the point, he gives work and cheap rooms, and so intensifies the rush towards Paris, which he wishes to diminish. M. Clemenceau pours out the wisest sentences, and demands fairer taxation, the abolition of the Octroi—which may be wise, but would cheapen neither bread nor rent—and the suspension of waste on expeditions ; but when asked what he will do to feed starving people to- morrow, he has nothing to suggest but a Committee of Inquiry. The essence of the problem, that an evicted man may and con- stantly does get pneumonia from the first night of exposure, and that no one can risk forty-eight hours without food, baffles all but the officials ; and they, who do perceive it, think of nothing but getting rid of that one difficulty of time. They give, under pretty pretexts, a State dole of alms. The consciousness of the social problem deepens, but of any plan to alleviate it we do not perceive a trace. In this country we have at least one effective idea,—that every person shall have a right to such food and shelter from the community as will keep him alive, and rough as that is, it works ; but the Continentals everywhere repudiate that pro- posal, with a horror based partly on fear of Socialism, and partly on Catholic distaste for a system which they say "legislates away a virtue." The Dutch, who in all things have the advantage of their sternness, have a system of public works for the able-bodied poor, which is as like penal servi- tude as any scheme not involving disgrace can be, and France would not accept that. Migration from the congested places, which would be most effective, if it could be carried out, is resisted by the workmen, who have learned to hate the death-in-life of the villages ; and for the final cure, com- pulsory insurance, the people are not intelligent enough. In- deed, M. Clemenceau says he will not vote for it, because it interferes with liberty. No other practicable plan is so much as discussed, and so the distressed, and those who fear to be distressed, and those who sympathise with the distressed, all alike fall back upon an irrational panacea, that "liquida- tion of Society" which would produce nothing but rain—which, for example, would in forty-eight hours leave the great cities without their supply of food, the vast, yet delicate mechanism of supply stopping for want of capital—and which Society is strong enough to prevent by an unhesitating resort to bullets. The situation is a strange one, and is at this moment far more dangerous in countries where land is plentiful or much divided, than in England where the land is comparatively of no area, and is held in such large blocks.
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