But this attitude of humble obedience was the result of sheer necessity, of the need for a short breathing space after the long and tumultuous years when every new morning brought new uniforms, new political platforms, new police regulations and new rulers, both of Heaven and earth. It would be erroneous, however, to conclude from this general air of subservience, from this loud hurray-ing for the divinely appointed masters, that the people in their heart of hearts had forgotten the new doctrines which the drums of Sergeant Le Grand had so merrily beaten into their heads and hearts.
As their governments, with that moral cynicism inherent in all reactionary dictatorships, insisted chiefly upon an outward semblance of decency and order and cared not one whit for the inner spirit, the average subject enjoyed a fairly wide degree of independence. On Sunday he went to church with a large Bible under his arm. The rest of the week he thought as he pleased. Only he held his tongue and kept his private opinions to himself and aired his views when a careful inspection of the premises had first assured him that no secret agent was hidden underneath the sofa or was lurking behind the tile stove. Then however he discussed the events of the day with great gusto and sadly shook his head when his duly censored, fumigated and sterilized newspaper told him what new idiotic measures his masters had taken to assure the peace of the realm and bring about a return to the status quo of the year of grace 1600.
What his masters were doing was exactly what similar masters with an imperfect knowledge of the history of human nature under similar circumstances have been doing ever since the year one. They thought that they had destroyed free speech when they ordered the removal of the cracker-barrels from which the speeches that had so severely criticized their government had been made. And whenever they could, they sent the offending orators to jail with such stiff sentences (forty, fifty, a hundred years) that the poor devils gained great renown as martyrs, whereas in most instances they were scatter-brained idiots who had read a few books and pamphlets which they had failed to understand.
Warned by this example, the others kept away from the public parks and did their grumbling in obscure wine shops or in the public lodging houses of overcrowded cities where they were certain of a discreet audience and where their influence was infinitely more harmful than it would have been on a public platform.
There are few things more pathetic in this world than the man upon whom the Gods in their wisdom have bestowed a little bit of authority and who is in eternal fear for his official prestige. A king may lose his throne and may laugh at a misadventure which means a rather amusing interruption of a life of dull routine. And anyway he is a king, whether he wears his valet’s brown derby or his grandfather’s crown. But the mayor of a third rate town, once he has been deprived of his gavel and his badge of office, is just plain Bill Smith, a ridiculous fellow who gave himself airs and who is now laughed at for his troubles. Therefore woe unto him who dares to approach such a potentate pro tem without visible manifestations of that reverence and worship due to so exalted a human being.
But those who did not stop at burgomasters, but who openly questioned the existing order of things in learned tomes and handbooks of geology and anthropology and economics, fared infinitely worse.
They were instantly and dishonorably deprived of their livelihood. Then they were exiled from the town in which they had taught their pernicious doctrines and with their wives and children were left to the charitable mercies of the neighbors.
This outbreak of the reactionary spirit caused great inconvenience to a large number of perfectly sincere people who were honestly trying to go to the root of our many social ills. Time, however, the great laundress, has long since removed whatever spots the local police magistrates were able to detect upon the professorial garments of these amiable scholars. Today, King Frederick William of Prussia is chiefly remembered because he interfered with the teachings of Emanuel Kant, that dangerous radical who taught that the maxims of our own actions must be worthy of being turned into universal laws and whose doctrines, according to the police reports, appealed only to “beardless youths and idle babblers.” The Duke of Cumberland has gained lasting notoriety because as King of Hanover he exiled a certain Jacob Grimm who had signed a protest against “His Majesty’s unlawful abrogation of the country’s constitution.” And Metternich has retained a certain notoriety because he extended his watchful suspicion to the field of music and once censored the music of Schubert.
Poor old Austria!
Now that it is dead and gone, all the world feels kindly disposed towards the “gay empire” and forgets that once upon a time it had an active intellectual life of its own and was something more than an amusing and well-mannered county-fair with excellent and cheap wine, atrocious cigars and the most enticing of waltzes, composed and conducted by no one less than Johann Strauss himself.