In Germany the Reich, though composed of small, disconnected atoms, only contained members of a single race. In Austria conditions were otherwise.
In the various countries, apart from Hungary, there were no memories of a great past, or perhaps the passing of time had extinguished them ; at any rate, they were dim and blurred. But in their place during the period of the principle of nationality popular forces developed in those countries, all the harder to circumvent at a time when national States began to be formed on the edges of the Monarchy, the peoples of which, being racially related or identical with nationalities in Austria, were in a position to exert more attraction than German Austria possibly could.
Even Vienna failed to stand up to this struggle. In Buda Pest, which had developed into a capital city, Vienna was for the first time faced by a rival whose task it was not so much to weld the whole Monarchy together, as to strengthen one part of it. Soon Prague was to follow Buda Pest’s example, then Lemberg, Laibach, and other centres.
Ever since the death of Joseph II (1790) the course of this process could be clearly traced. Its speed depended on a number of factors, which lay partly in the Monarchy itself, but were in other respects the result of the Empire’s political position at various times towards foreign countries.
If the struggle to maintain this State was to be taken up seriously and fought to a finish, ruthless and con¬ sistent centralization alone could attain the object. But homogeneity in form must be expressed by estab¬ lishment in principle of a unified State language, and the technical instrument for this had to be forced into the hands of the administration, for without it a unified State could not endure. The only way, moreover, of producing uniform and permanent State consciousness was through the schools and education. It could not be achieved in ten or twenty years, but one had to think in centuries, for, as