Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/219

 STIRRING i TIMES; IN AUSTRIA

where. All the mentioned creators, promoters, ancj preservers of the public tranquillity do their several shades in the quieting wprk: They make a restful and comfortable! serenity and reposefulness. This is disturbed sometimes for a little while: a mob as sembles to protest against something; it gets noisy noisier still noisier finally too noisy; then the persuasive soldiery come charging down upon it, and in a few minutes all is quiet again, and there is no mob,

There is a Constitution and there is a Parliament. The House draws its membership of 425 deputies from the nineteen or twenty states heretofore men tioned. These men represent peoples who speak eleven languages. That means eleven distinct varie ties of jealousies, hostilities, and warring interests. This could be expected to furnish forth a parlia ment of a pretty inharmonious sort, and make legis lation difficult at times and it does that. The parliament is split up into many parties the Cler icals, the Progressists, the German Nationalists, the Young Czechs, the Social Democrats, the Christian Socialists, and some others and it is difficult to get u p working combinations among them. They prefer to fight apart sometimes.

The recent troubles have grown out of Count Badern b necessities. He could not carry on his government without a majority vote in the House at his back, and in order to secure it he had to make a trade of some sort. He made it with the Czechs^the Bohemians/ The terms were not easy for him t he mut pass a bill making the Czech tongue

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