struction is
unfavourable to an organised uprising, and without unity what could a
revolt accomplish? It is disunion which has held our empire together for
centuries, and what it has done in the past it may continue to do now
and in the future.'

The most intelligible sketch I have encountered of this unintelligible
arrangement of things was contributed to the 'Traveller's Record' by Mr.
Forrest Morgan, of Hartford, three years ago. He says:

'The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy is the patchwork-quilt, the Midway
Plaisance, the national chain-gang of Europe; a state that is not a
nation, but a collection of nations, some with national memories and
aspirations and others without, some occupying distinct provinces
almost purely their own, and others mixed with alien races, but each
with a different language, and each mostly holding the others
foreigners as much as if the link of a common government did not
exist. Only one of its races even now comprises so much as
one-fourth of the whole, and not another so much as one-sixth; and
each has remained for ages as unchanged in isolation, however
mingled together in locality, as globules of oil in water. There
is nothing else in the modern world that is nearly like it, though
there have been plenty in past ages; it seems unreal and impossible
even though we know it is true; it violates all our feeling as to
what a country should be in order to have a right to exist; and it
seems as though it was too ramshackle to go on holding together any
length of time. Yet it has survived, much in its present shape, two
centuries of storms that have swept perfectly unified countries
from existence and others that have brought it to the verge of
ruin, has survived formidable European coalitions to dismember it,
and has steadily gained force after each; forever changing in its
exact make-up, losing in the West but gaining in the East, the
changes leave the structure as firm as ever, like the dropping off
and adding on of logs in a raft, its mechanical union of pieces
showing all the vitality of genuine national life.'

That seems to confirm and justify the prevalent Austrian faith that in
this confusion of unrelated and irreconcilable elements, this condition
of incurable disunion, there is strength--for the Government. Nearly
every day some one explains to me that a revol