Jasper County Democrat, Volume 2, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 March 1900 — FRANCIS [ARTICLE]

FRANCIS

The Dominating Influence of the Emperor of Austria. It is the rarest kind of tribute to personal worth that Francis Joseph should stand out after these 50 troublous years as the one point of agreement that is common to all his peoples. Much of his authority is due to the great tragedies of his life; much also to the racial wranglings and cliques that by a process of exhaustion have lifted the monarchy above party influence into a position of determinating influence; but more to the character of the emperor himself. It was many years before the real nature of that character could make itself known. Education and surroundings had made Francis Joseph a bigot and an autocrat. The collapse of the Hungarian revolt was followed by ten years of pitiless reaction. The church and the army were summoned to make authority, the German language, and the German bureaucracy paramount among 30,000,000 aliens of Slav, Ural-Altaic and Latin extraction. Such an attempt spelt absolutism iirtts crudest form. The Austrian empire of 40 years ago was in all its essentials a medieval state.

The change came when, as a result of the French and Prussian wars, constitutionalism took the place of autocracy and the “principle of nationality” was partly admitted. Her old rights of self-government were restored to Hungary, and the Austrian empire converted into the dual monarchy. The great sacrifice once made, other reforms came more easily. Austria has grown toward liberalism since 18G0 with a rapidity that no other country has equaled.—Harper’s Weekly.