the same conditions of life in which they then existed,
and in which their fathers had existed before them. For this purpose
every old, established, hereditary authority was upheld in the same
manner as that of the State; the authority of the landlord over the
petty tenant farmer, that of the manufacturer over the operative, of
the small master over the journeyman and apprentice, of the father
over the son, was everywhere rigidly maintained by the Government, and
every branch of disobedience punished the same as a transgression of
the law, by that universal instrument of Austrian justice--the stick.

Finally, to wind up into one comprehensive system all these attempts
at creating an artificial stability, the intellectual food allowed to
the nation was selected with the minutest caution, and dealt out as
sparingly as possible. Education was everywhere in the hands of the
Catholic priesthood, whose chiefs, in the same manner as the large
feudal landowners, were deeply interested in the conservation of the
existing system. The universities were organized in a manner which
allowed them to produce nothing but special men, that might or might
not obtain great proficiency in sundry particular branches of
knowledge, but which, at all events, excluded that universal liberal
education which other universities are expected to impart. There was
absolutely no newspaper press, except in Hungary, and the Hungarian
papers were prohibited in all other parts of the monarchy. As to
general literature, its range had not widened for a century; it had
narrowed again after the death of Joseph II. And all around the
frontier, wherever the Austrian States touched upon a civilized
country, a cordon of literary censors was established in connection
with the cordon of customhouse officials, preventing any foreign book
or newspaper from passing into Austria before its contents had been
twice or three times thoroughly sifted, and found pure of even the
slightest contamination of the malignant spirit of the age.

For about thirty years after 1815 this system worked with wonderful
success. Austria remained almost unknown to Europe, and Europe was
quite as little known in Austria. The social state of every class of
the population, and of the population as a whole, appeared not to have
undergone the slightest change. Whatever rancour there might exist
from class to class--and the existence of this rancour was for
Metternich a principal condition of gov