urg, and Vorarlberg, the larger portion of Lower Austria,
north-western Carinthia, the north and center of Styria and Tyrol,
and, in fact, are distributed much more generally over the entire
Empire than is any one of the other racial elements. The Slavs are in
two principal groups, the northern and the southern. The northern
includes the Czechs and Slovaks, dwelling principally in Bohemia and
Moravia, and numbering, in 1900, 5,955,397; the Poles, comprising a
compact mass of 4,252,483 people in Galicia and Silesia; and the
Ruthenes, numbering 3,381,570, in eastern Galicia and in Bukovina. The
southern Slavic group includes the Slovenes, numbering 1,192,780, in
Carniola, Goerz, Gradisca, Istria, and Styria, and the Servians and
Croats, numbering 711,380, in Istria and Dalmatia. The peoples of
Latin stock are the Italians and Ladini (727,102), in Tyrol, Goerz,
Gradisca, Dalmatia, and Trieste, and the Roumanians (230,963) in
Bukovina. Within many of the groups mentioned there is meager survival
of political unity. There are German Clericals, German Progressives,
German Radicals, German Agrarians; likewise Old Czechs, Young Czechs,
Czech Realists, Czech Agrarians, Czech Clericals, and Czech Radicals.
Austrian party history within the past fifty years comprises largely
the story of the political contests among the several nationalities,
and of the disintegration of these nationalities into a bewildering
throng of clamorous party cliques.

*527. Centralists and Federalists.*--The more important of the party
groups of to-day trace their origins to the formative period in recent
Austro-Hungarian constitutional history, 1860-1867. During this period
the fundamental issue in the Empire was the degree of centralization
which it was desirable, or possible, to achieve in the reshaping (p. 476)
of the governmental system. On the one hand were the centralists, who
would have bound the loosely agglomerated kingdoms, duchies, and
territories of the Empire into a consolidated state. On the other were
the federalists, to whom centralization appeared dangerous, as well as
unjust to the Empire's component nationalities. Speaking broadly, the
Germans, supported by the Italians, comprised the party of
centralization; the Slavs, that of federalism. The establishment of
the constitution of 1867, as well as of the Compromise with Hungary in
the same year, was the achievement of the centralists, and with the
completion of this gigantic task the