The following interesting article from William M. F. Round in the Independent, gives a good idea of the condition of society in the oldest part of Europe:
“Until a stranger has been long enough in Austria to fully understand the people and their methods of life, together with the relations of government to the same, he will be at a loss to reconcile the seeming discrepancy between the high prices of all domestic products and the low prices of every description of manual labor. If he remains in Vienna or confines his investigation only to the large cities, he will fall into the very natural error of supposing that the empire must be so overcrowded with population as to keep the supply ever within the demand. But let the student make a trip up the Danube and through the heart of Upper Austria, and he will find broad fields, magnificent forests, and mountain sides that afford pastures of the greatest richness. He may walk for hours without seeing a single human habitation, and in a day’s pedestrian journey will stumble across but two or three villages, each one lying within or under the shadow of some ancient castle-wall or monastery. At night he may inquire, as he rests in some modest Austrian country inn, who owns the fields and forests that he sees from the window; and he will be told that the house where he rests, the landscape that his eye encompasses, the country through which he has walked and through which he will walk on the morrow, all belong to the demesne of some Grossherzog, who has held them in hereditary right since the feudal ages, when his peasants were content to be vassals, in consideration of the protection he afforded them.
In a knowledge of this fact is the first step toward an understanding of the relations between Austrian labor and Austrian capital. The nobles claim privileges that have long ceased to be rights, and the Austrian peasant has neither the sense to comprehend nor the courage to resist the power that forces himself and his family into a position of degradation and slavery, while it robs him of the legitimate fruits of his toil. There is a world-wide average value of labor, based upon the universal law of supply and demand; and a country may be reckoned as prosperous or unprosperous in proportion as the prices of labor reach above or fall below this standard. In Austria they fall far below it; as far below it as they rise above it in America. Of course, the standard of labor value exists unchanged; and every Austrian laborer earns it, but he does not get it. Only a small part of it is allowed to him, and the rest goes to support a government made up of an effete aristocracy and a still more effete church. The difference between the true value of labor and the price paid to the laborer here may be regarded as a direct and unpardonable robbery, for which the Austrian dynasty is to answer in blood, by and by. The sops which it has chosen to throw to a people who are already beginning to grumble, in the way of indifferent educational privileges, and the summer’s fete just expiring as a failure, are likely to help the matter about as much as a sugar-plum would stay the hunger of a starving man.
“The people are taxed and taxed again. They are taxed for the land they live on, for the houses they live in, and for all they eat and drink and wear. They are taxed for their pleasures, all their luxuries, as they should be; but they are also taxed, and most heavily, for the necessities of life, as they should not be. If they ride on the railways, five per cent. of the price of their tickets goes to the government. There is nothing they touch in their struggle for life, but the government contrives to make something out of the contract. Then, when the government has taken all it dares to take, the church steps in with its system of robbery, under the pretense of saving souls. When the church is satisfied, there is little left for the peasant; and the consequence is, he goes on toiling harder than a galley slave, and kept too weak in body and soul by his hard living of black bread and sour wine, and by the spiritual slops that are reluctantly fed to him by the educational powers to think of resistance.
“There may be peasants lower down in the social scale than those of Austria. But I have not seen them. They are little better than brutes in all that goes to make life attractive. They toil only that they may fill themselves with the coarsest food, and expect no higher pleasure from their feeding than the sensation of being full. They marry because the church directs that they shall not cohabit without marriage. Their moral sensibilities are of the lowest, and the powers of their souls have been reduced as nearly as possible to a mere matter of brute instinct. They are to be pitied, not blamed, for their condition. So much is taken from each laborer’s23earnings to support the government and the church that all—men, women and children—must work to supply the commonest, coarsest necessities of existence.
I have seen, often enough, women engaged in the most menial occupation of agriculture, such as the spreading of manure and the herding of cattle, with their little ones swathed in a stout cloth and bound to their shoulders or their breasts. I have seen four women yoked like mules to a plow, and a man complacently holding the same. In the streets of Vienna it is not an uncommon thing to see a woman and a dog harnessed side by side to a cart. The hod-bearers are women, the street-sweepers are women, the hewers of wood and drawers of water are women.
“There is but one gate out of this bondage, and over that is written prostitution. Who dares blame the thousands of young women in the humbler stations of Austrian life for having chosen this gate to an easier existence, when a priest stands by and declares that he can, by virtue of his holy office, insure immunity from punishment in the world to come? I say this boldly, for, whatever the church of Rome may teach on this subject, I know that the priests of Austria teach and the people of Austria understand just what I have said. So great is the power of the priests and so deep the superstition of the people that the merest tricks are imposed as real miracles. On an Easter morning during the celebration of the mass in one of the little towns of Upper Austria, the dim flame of the sanctuary lamp suddenly burst into a bright light, just as the Host is elevated, and apparently without human intervention. The greatest excitement prevails. People go down on their faces, and cry: ‘A miracle! A miracle!’ The priests take advantage of the occasion to extort an unusual offering, and not one among the simple-minded congregation has an idea that a trick known to every pyrotechnist has been practiced.”
“But a revolution is already dawning, and the very means which the Austrian government is taking to protect itself from external enemies serve to warm a dangerous serpent in the bosom of the empire.”
“Even now there is a liberal party growing up in the Austrian Empire which well understands these things, and will know how to apply a radical cure where the occasion serves.”
“But there is to be a reform by and by; and the labor reformation and the religious reformation will go hand in hand, beginning on the day when, in favor of Ultramontanism, Austria shall give countenance to France, and Protestant Prussia and Russia resent the interference.”
In Austria, then, as in all other nations, the elements already threaten a storm. Indeed, the whole world seems to be ripe for some great revolution and all are looking for it with fear and dread. The Lord foretold this as a sign of the end. See Luke 21 : 25–27; Rev. 11 : 18. The winds are now only being held a little while till God’s message may be given to the world. Rev. 7 : 1–4.