Henry Wickham Steed, The Hapsburg Monarchy (London: Constable and Company, Ltd., 1919)

THE BUREAUCRACY

In every organized State the question of the relationship between the State officials and the public which supports them is acquiring increasing importance, but nowhere is it so urgent as in the Hapsburg Monarchy.

Though the Monarch is imbued with a sense of his divinely constituted Imperial authority and of his dynastic mission, his rule over matters coming under his immediate control is just and clement when compared with the anonymous tyranny exercised through a dozen Departments and a hundred divisions of State by thousands of hierarchical potentates. Experience of and reflection upon the nature of bureaucratic rule in Austria and other countries leads to the conclusion that it possesses four main characteristics : The sense of authority and of superiority over those who are administered or governed, a sense formerly existing in the shape of a corporate bureaucratic consciousness, but now atomized and individualized ; the dislike of responsibility, and, consequently, a disposition to clothe administrative action in elusive forms elaborated by the practice of generations ; the hierarchical spirit which renders every official of a certain rank an object of respect for officials of lower rank and makes the attainment of higher rank the main object of bureaucratic endeavour ; and the tendency to resent, as a sort of lese-majeste, all attempts to criticize the working, to curtail the power, or to reform the organization of the bureaucracy itself. This last-named characteristic is perhaps the strongest tie between Austrian officials to-day. A curious instance may be cited. Not long ago the manager of a Court Theatre wished to revive a comedy by a well known Austrian-German author which one of his predecessors had produced with success. On being consulted, the author expressed doubt whether the Court authorities would sanction the revival, since a chapter in one of his subsequent nondramatic works had been suppressed by the public prosecutor on the plea that it contained passages offensive to the dynasty. The manager, on inquiry, ascertained - that this doubt was unfounded and that neither the Court authorities nor the Emperor had any objection to the revival of the comedy. He therefore decided to revive it, but received a hint that it would be well to consult the archives of the theatre before taking further steps. In the archives he

discovered a letter from a former Austrian Premier, an official, to the previous manager of the theatre asking that no further plays by that author might be produced at the Court Theatre, in view of the strictures which the author had passed upon the bureaucracy. The manager thereupon applied to the Premier of the day, another official, for a removal of the ban, but was informed that nothing could be done. Ferdinand Kurnberger, whose collected essays are an indispensable guide to the comprehension of things Austrian, devoted one of his most brilliant satires to the illustration of this bureaucratic spirit. It was inspired by the difficulty which he and an ex-officer named Schoffel experienced in bringing to justice sundry corrupt officials who were attempting to sell to Jewish speculators the girdle of meadow and forest that renders the environs of Vienna the most beautiful of any European capital. Schoffel and Kurnberger saved the forest girdle, and a modest monument at Modling bears witness to their merits. Kurnberger's satire "Dishonesty is the Best Policy" [1] deals with the terror of a thieving "Moroccan" official whose depredations in the forests of his master had been discovered. By a Frankish friend the thief was encouraged to redouble his depredations and at the same time to have himself and the official caste publicly denounced in the "Moroccan" press. This having been done, the thief flourished exceedingly, and escaped punishment because the fact that an official had been publicly denounced was enough to ensure him the protection of his fellow-officials, all of whom swore by the mystic formula Justament not!

The justament spirit, and what is known as Justamentpolitik, play a large part in Austrian affairs. It is an inverted spirit of authority, a consciousness of power to obstruct that may perhaps be rendered in English by the phrase, "You just shan't!" The Bureaucracy has immense powers of obstruction, and uses them when its authority is ignored or its importance questioned. Otherwise it is inoffensive, or

at least non-aggressive. Austrian officials are, as a rule, well-educated, well-mannered men of easy disposition and devoid of stiffness. They are often willing to show the private citizen a short-cut through a law or a way round an apparently insuperable obstacle. But the private citizen must recognize, at least by implication, their power and authority. He must, so to speak, sue in forma pauperis for their help, without insistence upon what he may consider his rights. Under the "architectural police regulations" in Austria it is, for instance, technically impossible to build a theatre so as to make it a profitable undertaking. Yet new theatres are built and flourish, while old theatres that violate the main principles of the regulations are maintained. The good-natured authorities are willing to close one eye to illegalities, on the tacit understanding that he who profits by such indulgence will not be recalcitrant should the convenience of the State require pliancy on his part. The manager of a theatre who should refuse to remove from the playbill a play displeasing to the authorities, or should insist upon the circumstance that the play had been authorized by the censor, might find the sanitary arrangements of his theatre declared to be insufficient by a special commission, or the condition of the ceiling perilous, or the fire exits much too narrow. If he were wise he would speedily understand the impropriety of the play. A singular case occurred some three years ago in connexion with a military "skit" written by an ex-officer of literary proclivities. It was produced, with the consent of the censor, and played nineteen times, not only without objection but to the great amusement of the civilian and military public. Then some officious prig discovered that one of the personages was a caricature of an important military dignitary. The manager, who was bound by contract to the author, failed to withdraw the play when gently pressed to do so by the authorities. He was therefore summoned to the police headquarters and recommended to announce that the chief actor was ill; otherwise, he was reminded, his licence, which had only been granted for

musical comedy, would need revision. Too old a hand to think of resistance, the manager prepared to capitulate, but the Stage Society and the Authors' Society intervened, and unkindly threatened to boycott him if he gave way. He therefore begged the authorities to prohibit the play; but they, ever chary of incurring responsibility, answered that he must petition for a prohibition. The manager demurred, and offered to make "cuts" and other alterations. The authorities claimed that before this offer could be accepted the Auxiliary Council of the censorship must be consulted. The Council thereupon saved the situation by refusing to sanction the alterations and by forbidding a harmless farce which the censor had originally sanctioned.

Kurnberger would call this state of things "Asiatic." It is simpler to call it bureaucratically Austrian. The bureaucracy feels itself to be the State; and, for the public at large, it is the State. So instinctively is this truth recognized that the "race struggle" in Austria, of which so much has been said and written, is largely a struggle for bureaucratic appointments. Germans and Czechs have striven for years to increase on the one hand and defend on the other their patrimony of official positions. The essence of the language struggle is that it is a struggle for bureaucratic influence. Similarly, the demands for new Universities or High Schools put forward by Czechs, Ruthenes, Slovenes, and Italians but resisted by the Germans, Poles, or other races, as the case may be, are demands for the creation of new machines to turn out potential officials whom the political influence of Parliamentary parties may then be trusted to hoist into bureaucratic appointments. In the Austrian Parliament the Government, which consists mainly of officials, sometimes purchases the support of political leaders by giving State appointments to their kindred or proteges, or by promoting proteges already appointed. One hand washes the other, and service is rendered for service. On occasion the votes of a whole party can be bought by the appointment of one of its prominent members to a permanent Under

Secretaryship in a Department of State. Once appointed, he is able to facilitate the appointment of other officials of his own race or party. Each position thus conquered forms part of the political patrimony of the race or party by whom it has been secured, and is defended stoutly against attack. Appointments are thus multiplied exceedingly to the cost of the taxpayer and to the complication of public business.

Joseph II, who made a gallant attempt to reform and simplify the bureaucracy, wrote in his memorandum of 1765 on the state of the Monarchy: "II arrive que personne ne travaille, et qu'entre cent rames de papier qui se consument bien en huit jours dans les dicasteres de Vienne, il n'y a pas quatre feuillets d'esprit, ou de choses nouvelles ou de propres idees. Le preambule, une longue recaptiulation, et deux mots d'opinion composent nos referats, qui se reduisent toujours a peu pres au meme personne ne travaille.[1] Though it would be untrue and unjust to say that nowadays it would be easy to prove that of every hundred reams of paper consumed in the Austrian Departments of State, ninety are wasted in superfluities. Red tape exists the world over, but the extent to which it impedes freedom of movement in the Hapsburg Monarchy should be a warning to all countries that lightly propose to add new wheels to the bureaucratic machine. Professor Joseph Redlich, a prominent member of the Reichsrath and a competent critic of the Austrian administrative system, seems indeed to agree with Joseph II. More work must be done, he writes. [2] Our officials in Vienna do not work enough. There are Departments in which one is astonished at the number of officials, and asks what all these people do. It is, for instance, incomprehensible why an Audit Office should need so many hands as are to be found in our audit offices. What is called "bureaucratism" proceeds from this plethora. Bureaucratism is form without

substance, appearance without reality, careful maintenance of appearances coupled with indifference towards results. The multiplication of officials is naturally a consequence of the multiplication of departments and authorities. Let me, continues Professor Redlich, give an instance taken from practical life. What happens in Austria when the caretaker in an Industrial Education Extension School asks the schoolmaster for a special remuneration of twenty Kronen (1 6s. 8d.) ? The master transmits the request with a favourable note to the Provincial Schools Council. There the request is registered and submitted to a superior official of the audit department of the Council. This department emits an opinion, on the basis of which the Provincial Council reports to the Ministry of Public Works, after the report has been duly drawn up, approved, and revised by three separate officials. In the Ministry the report is registered and numbered, and is handed by the chief of a department to a special official for consideration, and eventually an opinion is obtained from the audit department of the Ministry. An understanding with the Ministry of Finance may also be requisite. In this case the request is sent to the Finance Ministry, accompanied by a ministerial document from the Ministry of Public Works. In the Finance Ministry this document is reported upon, approved by one official, and revised by his superior, after having been registered, numbered, fair-copied, collated, and transmitted from one department to another. Finally a decision is taken, communicated to the Ministry for Public Works, which communicates it to the Provincial Schools Council, where it is again registered and reported upon. Ultimately the Provincial Council informs the master of the school that the special remuneration for the caretaker cannot be granted !

Lest it be imagined that this example is exaggerated, the procedure in another instance may be given. A doctor wishes to found a Sanatorium and applies for a licence. The application goes to the juridical Department, and after due registration, examination, fair-copying, approval, and revision

is transmitted thence to the technical departments, of which there are two. These departments deal with it after the same fashion, and ultimately send it back, with their opinions, to the juridical Department which orders a local investigation. The local investigation having been made, the report upon it goes once more to the juridical Department and is by it again submitted, with due observance of bureaucratic procedure, to the two technical departments. Here it is subjected to expert examination, and unless which is rarely the case - the first local investigation is considered to have been exhaustive, the juridical Department is advised by the technical departments to instruct the local authorities to make a supplementary local investigation, the report on which is sent by the local authorities back to the juridical Department and by the latter to the two technical departments. Then, if no objection has been discovered, the licence may be granted and its happy possessor may begin his struggle with the provincial and municipal officials who have jurisdiction over building and other regulations. If it be remembered that at every stage of this complicated procedure each document is subjected to half a dozen bureaucratic processes, and requires, as the untranslatable bureaucratic jargon runs, to be praesentiert, exhibiert, indiziert, prioriert, konzipiert, revidiert, approbiert, mundiert, kollationiert, expediert, and registriert, it will be seen how large is the field for the employment of talent in the service of the State.

A former Papal Nuncio in Vienna, experienced in the slow and roundabout ways of the Roman Curia, expressed some years ago to the writer his indignation at the delays of Austrian bureaucracy. "One knows when a document is handed in to an Austrian Department of State," he said; "but a young man may grow old before knowing when he will see it again. Accustomed as I am to the business-like methods of the Vatican, I find these eternal delays exasperating"!

It should not be supposed that the public and the business world do not writhe under such an administra-

tive system. But no one has much hope of real reform. Every official appointed becomes a kind of vested interest. A new Joseph II, or a new Lueger, and a new popular movement would be required to reduce the bureaucracy and to simplify its procedure. It is therefore wiser for those who have dealings with the official world to cultivate a good personal relationship with influential officials and to obtain, by favour, the application of what is known as "short procedure" in their particular case. This wisdom is much practised. It is astonishing how rapidly the cumbrous bureaucratic machine can work when its wheels are greased by good-will. But where good-will is absent, or ill-will exists, the portals of a ministry might bear the inscription: Lasciate ogni Speranza, voi ch' entrate! Not even the direct personal command of the Emperor is always of avail to overcome the resistance of obdurate officials who seem, at times, determined to chasten the Monarch's sense of authority and to prove to him that L'etat, c'est nous! Some years ago a merchant, much esteemed but ill-advised, became involved in difficulties. A rascally lawyer, and an equally rascally relative, contrived to give to these difficulties a fraudulent appearance and to secure the condemnation of the merchant to a term of imprisonment. Indignant at such injustice, the friends of the family obtained for the victim's young daughter whom these machinations had reduced from affluence to shameful penury, a private audience of the Emperor, who, touched by the girl's story, gave her an order for her father's immediate release. The order was delivered to the competent official, but the merchant remained in prison and fell seriously ill. Anxious to save him from the shame of dying in prison, friends obtained a second audience for the daughter, to whom the Emperor, astonished that his first order should not have been obeyed, gave another and more peremptory command. Again the girl repaired to the competent official, who again, with disparaging remarks, showed a disposition to obstruct the course of Imperial clemency. Luckily the

girl, though scarcely more than a child, had the courage so vigorously to scold the official and so to threaten him with exposure, that he countersigned the order of release. The merchant was set free-to die a few weeks later among his impoverished family. The details of this singular instance of bureaucratic obstruction and the names of the persons concerned are known to the writer and can be vouched for.

When a State Department sets itself to obstruct either the course of justice or a claim against itself which, if admitted, might imply the existence of some culpability or negligence on the part of its officials, the resistance it can offer is almost insuperable. Early in 1911, at a level crossing on one of the State Railway lines in Bohemia, a waggon laden with wood stuck fast between the rails on account of the rottenness of a sleeper. A passing train smashed the waggon, killed one of the horses and injured another. The local tribunal acquitted the waggon-driver of blame and recognized that the fault lay with the railway administration. The waggon-driver consequently demanded from the State L50 indemnity. The first step of the State Railway Administration was to forbid the use of the horse that had been injured but had in the meantime recovered. Then seven different commissions, some of them consisting of eight persons, made "local investigations." The commissions were composed of officials from Pilsen, Eger, and Karlsbad, and included veterinary surgeons from Prague, Eger, and Karlsbad to enquire into the condition of the injured horse. The accident was "reconstructed" - a waggon loaded with wood was placed between the rails and a locomotive driven to within a foot of it. The repair of the defective sleeper was forbidden lest the de facto situation be changed pending the reports of the commissions. Presently, a local manufacturer, whose drays repeatedly stuck fast at the same crossing and had to be lifted out of it by main force, offered to repair the defective spot at his own expense. The railway traffic managing department at, Pilsen forbade him to do so - doubtless lest the case be prejudiced against

the State Railway by his action. On March 6, 1912, more than a year after the occurrence, a member of Parliament brought the matter to the notice of the Minister for Railways and pressed him to have it settled, but received from the Minister on July 3, 1912, the following notification: "The matter at issue is in the stage of probative procedure, and the management of the State Railways at Pilsen cannot therefore take up any attitude in regard to it until the procedure is terminated. Investigation on the spot, together with the examination of witnesses and experts, has already taken place and now the reports of the expert and the examination of several railway servants are awaited." The sequel is unknown, save that the unfortunate waggoner was ruined by the loss of his waggon and by the prohibition to use or sell his surviving horse.

The bureaucracy, whose power of obstruction such instances illustrate, is fast becoming the greatest Austrian problem. The nationalization of railways has increased the number of officials by leaps and bounds and has rendered reform imperative. State Railway servants are at once in the position of officials and of workmen. If the travelling public insults them, the insult comes within the category of "offences against State officials in the discharge of their functions." Yet, if railway servants are discontented, they can victimize the travelling public by striking work, or by "passive resistance," which consists in over-punctilious observation of the regulations. Austria has not yet ventured to imitate the Prussian system of dividing State officials into three broad categories - the superior officials with University or Technical High School education, the medium officials with a secondary school education, and the subaltern officials with lower educational qualifications ; nor is it certain that Austria, which is in many ways a more elastic State than Prussia, would do well merely to copy Prussian models. Austrian officials are divided into eleven ranks or classes. Though a university education is usually requisite for the attainment of the highest ranks, some favoured

individuals spring rapidly from rank to rank and obtain increased position and emoluments. But the mass have often to wait ten or twelve years before passing from a lower rank to a higher. Emoluments and advancement are fixed by law but an infinity of ordinances and special allowances leave room for favouritism and arbitrary treatment. Increases of salaries and allowances have repeatedly been voted by Parliament, but no statesman has yet had the courage to grapple with the problem as a whole.

The times, maybe, are not yet ripe for the drastic measures needed to effect a real improvement. Dynastic interest does not seem to demand immediate reform, nor has the people, in Carlyle's phrase, yet quite "got its eye on the knot that is strangling it." Lueger's attempts to defend the "small man" against the monopolistic organization of trade and industry led, and were bound to lead, to an increase of State and Municipal departments. The true defence against bureaucracy of all sorts - the cultivation of a spirit of political independence and of economic self-reliance among private individuals, and the treatment of bureaucrats as veritable servants, not as privileged masters of the commonwealth - is singularly difficult in Austria, where public acquiescence in the superiority of the State and its servants to the community at large is so general as to impede vigilant public control of bureaucratic doings. Reform, if reform be feasible, must come from above, or from within the bureaucracy itself, whose more intelligent members may presently perceive the dangers to which the overgrowth of departments and the multiplication of appointments are exposing the State and themselves. In Austria, changes of bureaucratic system have, since the middle of the eighteenth century, usually accompanied or preceded political metamorphosis. The process of transforming the old feudal State into a centralized polity began under the semi-enlightened autocracy of Maria Theresa who, with the help of Haugwitz and under the influence of French Mercantilism, strove to absorb into the State the independent

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administrations of the great nobles, the municipalities, the monasteries and the ecclesiastical sees. At the same time, the Police System, which was afterwards to become a synonym for Austrian rule, was gradually developed. When, on the death of his father in 1765, Joseph II became co-regent with his mother, Maria Theresa, the transforming tendency was accelerated. Little by little the power and jurisdiction of the feudal nobles were curtailed, the population began to perceive that the new bureaucrats were more influential than the old lords, the fiscal and military systems were reorganized and the juridico-administrative power of the Church broken. A special body of politico-economic doctrine was formulated by writers and professors like Martini and Sonnenfels, the latter a savant of Jewish extraction. Sonnenfels enunciated the theory that, in the interest of the State, the Police must control all manifestations of public life. The "Era of Enlightenment" had dawned. The Jesuits, formerly omnipotent, had been abolished and expelled; the Freemasons and other secret societies took their place and flourished exceedingly. The new bureaucracy was permeated by the lay spirit and by secular notions of the relationship between Church and State, of the nature of the marriage contract and of the lay character of education. The clergy itself accepted in part the new ideas and, like the nobility, acquiesced in the extension of the functions and attributes of the State. At first, the progressive centralization of public business caused delays and confusion, but when, in 1780, Joseph II succeeded entirely to Maria Theresa, his capacity for hard work made the new system as nearly a success as it could possibly become. He worked from dawn to dark and made his officials work likewise; but he established " conduct lists " for officials that made promotion depend upon secret reports and engendered a spirit of prying and delation. Deft manipulation of reports and of "conduct lists" enabled the Freemasons and other partisans of " enlightenment " to secure important appointments for their own nominees. The Jews, whom Maria Theresa

had detested, [1] but whom Joseph had partially emancipated, [2] made rapid headway, and Protestants found themselves tolerated and encouraged. The spirit of the age was Encyclopedist and Jansenist, but the channels through which it spread were German. Joseph's object was to create an Austrian nation out of the heterogeneous elements constituting the Hapsburg inheritance under the Pragmatic Sanction. Hence his attempt to establish German as a single State language for the whole Monarchy and his ordinance that none but officials knowing German could be eligible for appointment in Hungary. The inherent impossibility of transforming in so short a time his diversified feudal realms into a centralized State, the pertinacious resistance of the Magyars and his own declining health, doomed his work to formal failure. But the centralized bureaucracy survived him and remained the chief instrument of government throughout the nineteenth century.

When, upon Joseph's death in 1790 Leopold came from Tuscany and brought with him precise ideas concerning the secret police as a means of government, and a disposition less radical than that of his brother, the reaction that was to last till 1848, and from 1849 to 1867, gradually set in. The excesses of the French Revolution strengthened the reactionary tendency and enabled Leopold's successor, Francis, and his Ministers, Colloredo and Metternich, to transform the police and the bureaucracy into the instrument of oppression under which Northern Italy and the greater

part of Germany groaned for decades. Colloredo, the omnipotent Minister of the Emperor Francis, had seen that in the French Revolution, as in the earlier disturbances in Belgium and Holland, an important part had been played by lawyers, doctors, literary men, small capitalists and the lower clergy, whereas most of the monarchical counter-movements had been led by members of the nobility and supported by the common people, Hence, he concluded that danger to Thrones proceeded principally from the educated middle classes. His "system," subsequently taken over and developed by Metternich, sought, consequently, to curtail and circumscribe the development of the middle classes by means of bureaucratic and police control. A severe censorship impeded the publication of scientific or literary works. The centralized administration established by Joseph naturally became clogged when monarchs less energetic than he ascended the throne and when officials were no longer kept up to their duty by his example and martinet discipline. Matters which Joseph would have settled in a few days or weeks lingered under Francis and Colloredo from three to ten years. Francis, moreover, resembling in this his successors, distrusted men of talent. He regarded them as ambitious and prone to innovation. Mediocrity was preferred. This tendency remained strong in Austria throughout the nineteenth century and has not yet disappeared. It has been well defined as " the principle of inverted selection," the application of which guarantees Monarchs and Ministers tranquillity in ordinary times and leaves them without a reliable counsellor at moments of crisis. The bureaucracy was schooled to bow its head, obey and not interfere. Officials were forbidden to point out the defects of the working of laws and ordinances, and soon came to understand that when their opinion as "experts" was asked, flattering acquiescence rather than criticism was desired. In these circumstances the men of the "Party of Enlightenment" that had grown up under Joseph and was still strong in the lower bureaucracy were fain to hide their heads and

dissemble their existence. The word "Culture" was substituted for " Enlightenment," "virtue" was much talked of, and abject loyalty was professed towards the established order of things. This pliancy saved the party from destruction and preserved, at least in spirit, many of Joseph's minor ordinances. In later decades when milder breezes blew, Austrian "Liberalism" blossomed upon the old Josephine stock - an anaemic blossom, bearing traces of the means by which the stock had been kept alive. Austrian "Liberalism" was ever a hot-house plant. It had its roots in the bureaucracy and in financial and industrial capitalism, not in the people. Yet, between 1867 and 1879, it served a useful purpose until superseded by Lueger's Christian Socialism on the one hand, and by Social Democracy on the other. The disappearance of "Liberalism" and the degeneration of Austrian parliamentarianism into a system under which cabinets composed of officials purchase the support of parliamentary groups or of influential deputies by means of bureaucratic concessions, have tended at once to demoralize the bureaucracy itself and to increase its numbers. Now the community is confronted with a problem of the first magnitude for which no solution is yet in sight-the problem presented by the maintenance of an immense army of officials possessing executive authority and great obstructive but little creative power, an army whose maintenance eats up nearly one-third of the public revenues without contributing notably to them. The growing complexity of social and economic organization naturally implies an increase of the administrative and regulative elements and a decrease of the productive elements in a community. But in Austria the increase has been disproportionate and needs to be checked. Unless means are found to reduce the number and to increase the efficiency of offices and officials the bureaucracy itself will fall into discredit and will become at once a class of privileged drones and educated paupers. The cost of living has risen far more rapidly than the salaries of officials; progressive impoverishment and indebtedness are resulting. From time to time, Parliament is induced to

grant an extra dole of a few pounds per head per annum, but so great is the number of officials that, though the dole in the aggregate runs into millions of pounds and adds seriously to the burdens of the Exchequer, it brings no appreciable relief to those whom it is intended to benefit. Meanwhile the universities continue to train year by year thousands of youths for an official career. Formerly the training was almost exclusively legal and was calculated to unfit those who received it for practical comprehension of the needs of the people. These legally trained officials, or "jurists," still predominate in the Austrian bureaucracy; there are nearly two hundred of them in the Lord Lieutenancy of Lower Austria alone. But latterly the Technical High Schools have turned out engineers and other "experts" who have g one to swell the army of bureaucrats without greatly increasing its efficiency. As the supply is greater than the legitimate demand, political influences and "protection" of all kinds are called into play to secure appointments for qualified but unemployed candidates. Thus the evil grows, and the taxpayer is annually burdened with the maintenance of more and more officials who would have been better employed in trade, industry, agriculture, or even in skilled labour. Sooner or later the feeling that the bureaucracy, like the monasteries of the middle ages, are eating up the land will inevitably find expression in a demand for drastic retrenchment and reform.

Signs of change are already noticeable, though not of a change for the better. While hundreds of aspiring, artificially-trained youths crowd into the bureaucracy from below, some of the high officials, particularly those of Jewish extraction, are forsaking the service of the State for that of private or semi-private banks and business undertakings. Others claim their pensions at the earliest moment and increase their incomes by joining the boards of banks and industrial companies to which their former official connexions enable them to render valuable service. The points of subterranean contact between the bureaucracy and the private

enterprises which it ought in theory to control are thus increased, and new wheels are added to the wheels within wheels that complicate the working of Austrian affairs.