The people are, therefore, competing with their government for commodities and services. This competition makes it exceedingly difficult for the government to buy commodities and services. It also makes services and commodities rise in value until two dollars will not buy any more than one dollar bought before. It is because people will not save. They spend two dollars just as readily as one provided they have them to spend.

Someone has remarked that the government is spending money like a drunken sailor. The fact is the government is being made to do so through the thoughtlessness of its own people. The government expenditures are but a fraction of the total expenditures of the people. The people have a far greater purchasing power than their government. It is the extravagant spending by the people which makes it necessary for the government to spend money like water in order to prosecute the war expeditiously and effectively.

The more liberty bonds and the more taxes the government exacts, the more readily it can equip its army and navy, not alone because it thus secures greater funds but because thereby civilians can less effectively compete against it for services and commodities.

Every time we allow anyone to do anything for us which we can just as well do ourselves, or whenever we use commodities that we can do without, whether it is food or clothing or gasoline, we are helping Germany win the war just as effectively as though we were in the German trenches. Probably it is the most effective way because Germany does not need us, while America is in dire need of the commodities which we are using so thoughtlessly.

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: ITS PEOPLES AND

GOVERNMENT*

LUDWIK EHRLICH

If at the time when this lecture was announced I had been looking for a statement which would define all the issues of the present war, all the aims of the Allies in whose number the United States is now to be included, and all the tragic aspects of European conditions for which the afterwar settlement is to be a remedy, I could not have found any more luminous, concise and profoundly true exposition than that one made since then, and contained in one or two passages of the President's now famous War Message to Congress :

It was a war determined upon as war used to be determined upon in the old, unhappy days, when peoples were nowhere consulted by their rulers and wars were provoked and waged in the interest of dynasties or of little groups of ambitious men who were accustomed to use their fellow men as pawns and tools.

And again:

We are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretense about them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world, and for the ultimate liberation of its peoples . . . for the rights of nations, great and small, and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.

A lecture delivered at the University of California on April 6, 1917. Apart from the footnotes, the lecture is practically unchanged.

There can hardly be a better illustration of the conditions against which you are now waging war, than that very complex empire known as Austria-Hungary. One secondary aspect in which the war has already proved useful is that it has been a great teacher of geography and of political science. It would be interesting to find out how many of you, if asked, could tell anything definite about what is known as Austria-Hungary. There are numberless misconceptions abroad, not only such as are due to ignorance, for instance, when you think of "Austria" as a unit, when you speak of the "Austrian nation,' or even of an Austrian language, but such as in many cases have been

2

991

1 In how far the name "Austria" may be correctly used, is disputed. Ordinarily people in this country mean by "Austria" Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia (although, as a matter of fact, Dalmatia is now to all intents and purposes a part of the other state); the other state is sometimes referred to briefly as Austria, and some statutes warrant the use of this title (one statute speaks of "Austrian citizenship"; others of the "Austro-Hungarian Monarchy"). Yet the Austrian part of the Dual Monarchy is so far from being a historical, political, or ethnographic unit, that in Austrian legislation the state itself (i.e., the Austrian part) is, as a general rule, referred to as "the Kingdoms and Countries represented in the Reichsrat." These kingdoms and countries are different political units not belonging to the Crown of St. Stephen, and brought at different times under the Hapsburg yoke. The official gazette in which all statutes (for all kingdoms and countries, not for an individual kingdom or country) must be published is called the "Imperial Law Gazette for the Kingdoms and Countries represented in the Imperial Council" (Reichsgesetzblatt für die im Reichsrate vertretenen Königreiche und Länder). There are seventeen kingdoms and countries represented in the Reichsrat, each with a title of its own, e.g., the kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria with the Grand Duchy of Cracow and the duchies of Oswiecim and Zator, the Kingdom of Bohemia, the "princified" County of Tyrol, the Grand Duchy of Upper Austria, the Grand Duchy of Lower Austria, the Duchy of Styria. The whole is neither a national state, nor a federation, nor can or should it be defined by any one of the words used in the classification of states.

2 This question is best illustrated by section 2 of the statute of June 10, 1869, on the publication of statutes and ordinances through the Imperial Law Gazette: "The Imperial Law Gazette is published... in all languages ordinarily used (landesüblich) in the kingdoms and countries represented in the Reichsrat. The German edition . . . contains the authentic text. . . . The editions in the other languages ordinarily used, contain the official translations of the authentic text." The other seven languages are: Bohemian, Polish, Ruthenian (Little Russian, "Ukrainian"'), Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, Rumanian, and Italian.

...

3

deliberately spread by interested people, e.g., the legend about the great happiness prevailing among the pepoles of Austria, and the rest of it. I propose to discuss in this lecture not the details of the very complex problems of Austria-Hungary, but only what is necessary to understand the position of its people and government during the present war.

The cradle of the power of the Hapsburg empire was the small country around Vienna, now usually referred to as the Grand Duchy of Lower Austria. It was there, about the year 803, that Charlemagne formed his Eastern March to defend his empire against its eastern neighbors. The march disappeared a century later, but it reappeared about 972, and in 976 it was granted to a member of the house of Babenberg. That house enlarged its possessions to a certain extent and received some privileges from the emperor. It died out in 1246 and Austria, as it had come to be called, was soon taken possession of by the king of Bohemia. When, however, in 1273 the first Hapsburg came to the imperial throne, he at once started out to wrest Austria from Bohemia, and having succeeded, granted the country to his two sons in 1282, and finally to one of them in 1283. Both during the Bohemian period and after the accession of the Hapsburgs, the territory was enlarged, partly by conquest, partly by inheritance, or by treaties; the privileges of the house of Hapsburg were extended, largely by frauds; for

3 This legend has been particularly exploited by agents of Germany and of the Hapsburgs during the present war. Its persistence is due to many facts: for instance, the diplomatic representatives of the western powers and of the United States ordinarily saw things from Vienna, without being able to visit, or to understand the life in the different parts, each with a language, traditions, and aspirations of its own; moreover, any agitation for a change in the conditions would necessarily bring upon those undertaking it, barbarous punishment which would be out of proportion to any interest that foreign powers might be likely to take in the conditions.

4 Probably the best short constitutional history of Austria (including Hungary) is the Polish work by Professor Oswald Balzer of Lwów University (ed. 2, 1908), from which some of the historical data have been borrowed.

instance, the famous Privilegium Majus, purporting to contain a grant of privileges by the emperor, was, like several others, a forgery of the fourteenth century. Before the end of the Middle Ages, apart from Lower Austria, Upper Austria, Carinthia, Carniola, Tyrol, Styria and other neighboring territories had also come into the hands of the Hapsburgs. In 1526 the foundation of the modern Hapsburg empire was laid through the acquisition of the kingdom of Bohemia, including Moravia and Silesia, and also of part of Hungary. The ruler of Austria had made a compact with the king of Bohemia and Hungary (a son of the king of Poland), under which the grandson and granddaughter of the Hapsburg were to marry the daughter and the son of the Bohemian, respectively. Lewis, king of Hungary and Bohemia having perished in a battle against the Turks in 1526, his Hapsburg brother-in-law succeeded to both thrones, though his succession in Bohemia was due to election; moreover, only the western part of Hungary recognized him as a ruler, the central part declaring its independence, and the eastern part falling into the hands of the Turks. In the course of the seventeenth century the constitutional rights of Bohemia were annulled by the Hapsburgs after the efforts of the Bohemians to maintain their privileges had been crushed in the early part of the Thirty Years' War. Hungary was united under the Hapsburgs at the end of the seventeenth century, as a result, to a large extent, of Polish help (John Sobieski). The "grateful" Hapsburgs, not many decades afterwards, took from Poland the district of Spiz (Zips) in 1769, and then proceeded to participate in the first and third partitions of Poland (1772, 1795). They thus came into possession of what is now

5 All these acquisitions were purely dynastic, as the dynasty was the only bond of union between them; at times the Hapsburgs would acquire far-off countries, e.g., Spain, parts of Italy, the Netherlands, and American colonies.

The Battle of the White Mountain, 1620. The abolition of Bohemian and Moravian privileges (1627-28) was followed by a régime of terror and a policy of extermination which remind one of the atrocities perpetrated by the Hohenzollerns and Hapsburgs during the present war.