dy; the
peasantry, oppressed here by feudal exactions, there by money-lenders,
usurers, and lawyers; the working people of the towns infected with
the general discontent, equally hating the Government and the large
industrial capitalists, and catching the contagion of Socialist and
Communist ideas; in short, a heterogeneous mass of opposition,
springing from various interests, but more or less led on by the
bourgeoisie, in the first ranks of which again marched the bourgeoisie
of Prussia, and particularly of the Rhine Province. On the other hand,
Governments disagreeing upon many points, distrustful of each other,
and particularly of that of Prussia, upon which yet they had to rely
for protection; in Prussia a Government forsaken by public opinion,
forsaken by even a portion of the nobility, leaning upon an army and a
bureaucracy which every day got more infected by the ideas, and
subjected to the influence, of the oppositional bourgeoisie--a
Government, besides all this, penniless in the most literal meaning of
the word, and which could not procure a single cent to cover its
increasing deficit, but by surrendering at discretion to the
opposition of the bourgeoisie. Was there ever a more splendid position
for the middle class of any country, while it struggled for power
against the established Government?

LONDON, September, 1851.

IV.

AUSTRIA.

NOVEMBER 7th, 1851.

We have now to consider Austria; that country which, up to March,
1848, was sealed up to the eyes of foreign nations almost as much as
China before the late war with England.

As a matter of course, we can here take into consideration nothing but
German Austria. The affairs of the Polish, Hungarian, or Italian
Austrians do not belong to our subject, and as far as they, since
1848, have influenced the fate of the German Austrians, they will have
to be taken into account hereafter.

The Government of Prince Metternich turned upon two hinges; firstly,
to keep every one of the different nations subjected to the Austrian
rule, in check, by all other nations similarly conditioned; secondly,
and this always has been the fundamental principle of absolute
monarchies, to rely for support upon two classes, the feudal landlords
and the large stock-jobbing capitalists; and to balance, at the same
time, the influence and power of either of these classes by that of
the other, so as to leave full independence of a