he record is, on the whole,
favorable for the time, yet we cannot conceal the fact that with the
pauperism of certain sections of Germany, due to wars, drought, princely
maladministration, and unjust taxation, the female vices and crimes
which are instigated by poverty attained terrible proportions. The great
romantic authoress Bettina von Arnim has given us painful insight into
the lives of the poor women in the "family-houses" of Berlin, a sad
anticipation of our tenement houses. The female youth of the
God-forsaken proletariat then, as to-day, fell almost irretrievable
victims to the blasting, soul-consuming vice of prostitution. The
numberless examples of the brave, courageous, noble self-sacrifice of
hundreds of thousands of pure women of the poorest classes, who through
overwork staggered into an early grave, are not statistically reported;
but the statistics of prostitution of German cities, which are
conscientiously recorded, reveal a terrible state of affairs, not worse
than that of other great civilized nations, yet painful enough for the
historian of culture.

But let us return to the shadow of the thrones of the second half of the
eighteenth century. Under Maria Theresa's father, Charles VI.
(1711-1740), the last Habsburger, French morals had been domesticated in
Vienna. The monarch officially kept a mistress, maitresse en Hire. Lady
Montague, a distinguished British peeress, reported that "every lady of
rank in Vienna had two men, one who gave her his name, the other, who
fulfilled the duties of the husband." These alliances were so general
that it would have been a grievous offence not to invite the two men
with the lady to a feast. It is true that with Maria Theresa's ascent to
the throne a different morality was forced upon the unwilling court
circles. The empress was virtuous and religious in the extreme, an
admirable wife and mother, and maintained toward vice an unrelenting
attitude.

The political greatness of Empress Maria Theresa does not belong to our
theme. To characterize her, however, in a nutshell, we cannot forgo
quoting her famous note to Prime Minister Kaunitz, with which she
accompanied the treaty of the first partition of Poland in 1772: "When
all my States were assailed and I did not know where to bear my child, I
insisted upon my right and the help of God. But in this affair, in which
not only manifest justice cries to heaven against us, but also right and
common reason is against us,