of
absolutism could not be better constituted. The civil and military
officers in the Austrian service form a race of their own; their
fathers have been in the service of the Kaiser, and so will their sons
be; they belong to none of the multifarious nationalities congregated
under the wing of the double-headed eagle; they are, and ever have
been, removed from one end of the empire to the other, from Poland to
Italy, from Germany to Transylvania; Hungarian, Pole, German,
Roumanian, Italian, Croat, every individual not stamped with "imperial
and royal authority," etc., bearing a separate national character, is
equally despised by them; they have no nationality, or rather, they
alone make up the really Austrian nation. It is evident what a
pliable, and at the same time powerful instrument, in the hands of an
intelligent and energetic chief, such a civil and military hierarchy
must be.

As to the other classes of the population, Metternich, in the true
spirit of a statesman of the _ancien regime_, cared little for their
support. He had, with regard to them, but one policy: to draw as much
as possible out of them in the shape of taxation, and at the same
time, to keep them quiet. The trading and manufacturing middle class
was but of slow growth in Austria. The trade of the Danube was
comparatively unimportant; the country possessed but one port,
Trieste, and the trade of the port was very limited. As to the
manufacturers, they enjoyed considerable protection, amounting even in
most cases to the complete exclusion of all foreign competition; but
this advantage had been granted to them principally with a view to
increase their tax-paying capabilities, and was in a high degree
counterpoised by internal restrictions on manufactures, privileges on
guilds, and other feudal corporations, which were scrupulously upheld
as long as they did not impede the purposes and views of the
Government. The petty tradesmen were encased in the narrow bounds of
these Mediaeval guilds, which kept the different trades in a perpetual
war of privilege against each other, and at the same time, by all but
excluding individuals of the working class from the possibility of
raising themselves in the social scale, gave a sort of hereditary
stability to the members of those involuntary associations. Lastly,
the peasant and the working man were treated as mere taxable matter,
and the only care that was taken of them was to keep them as much as
possible in