ernment, which he even fostered
by making the higher classes the instruments of all Government
exactions, and thus throwing the odium upon them--whatever hatred the
people might bear to the inferior officials of the State, there
existed, upon the whole, little or no dissatisfaction with the Central
Government. The Emperor was adored, and old Francis I. seemed to be
borne out by facts when, doubting of the durability of this system, he
complacently added: "And yet it will hold while I live, and
Metternich."

But there was a slow underground movement going on which baffled all
Metternich's efforts. The wealth and influence of the manufacturing
and trading middle class increased. The introduction of machinery
and steam-power in manufactures upset in Austria, as it had done
everywhere else, the old relations and vital conditions of whole
classes of society; it changed serfs into free men, small farmers
into manufacturing operatives; it undermined the old feudal
trades-corporations, and destroyed the means of existence of many of
them. The new commercial and manufacturing population came everywhere
into collision with the old feudal institutions. The middle classes,
more and more induced by their business to travel abroad, introduced
some mythical knowledge of the civilized countries situated beyond the
Imperial line of customs; the introduction of railways finally
accelerated both the industrial and intellectual movement. There was,
too, a dangerous part in the Austrian State establishment, _viz._, the
Hungarian feudal Constitution, with its parliamentary proceedings, and
its struggles of the impoverished and oppositional mass of the
nobility against the Government and its allies, the magnates.
Presburg, the seat of the Diet, was at the very gates of Vienna. All
the elements contributed to create among the middle classes of the
towns a spirit, not exactly of opposition, for opposition was as yet
impossible, but of discontent; a general wish for reforms, more of an
administrative than of a constitutional nature. And in the same manner
as in Prussia, a portion of the bureaucracy joined the bourgeoisie.
Among this hereditary caste of officials the traditions of Joseph II.
were not forgotten; the more educated functionaries of the Government,
who themselves sometimes meddled with imaginary possible reforms, by
far preferred the progressive and intellectual despotism of that
Emperor to the "paternal" despotism of Metternich. A