By all accounts there is not even the will to govern well and make the new Austria into a going concern. Hence arises the economic problem of Austria, which is certainly grave. Here is a State which persistently refuses to live on its income, and prints off paper money to make up its deficiency. A highly expensive bureaucracy five times as large as is needed for little Austria pays itself first, and as for the rest of the population the devil can take the hindmost. The money-printing press works night and day. No loans, no foreign dole, will stop the operation of this machinery; what is necessary is a change of heart.
The expression "starving Austria" is a propaganda phrase. She may starve, she probably will, but the time is not yet. Individual classes of workers starve until they get their wages raised. There have been many moments of struggle between the time when the tram-conductor earned forty crowns a week to the time when he earned several thousand. Ten-thousand-crown notes are not uncommon among the working classes, and 10,000 crowns will purchase more than you could buy in England for five pounds, or in America for thirty dollars. A working-man's dinner with a glass of beer costs about a hundred crowns, a city man's lunch of three courses, a hundred and twenty. The working class is accused of constantly holding up the community for money by means of strikes. The truth is that here the organization of Labour and the strike-weapon proved a highly convenient method for getting level with the money-printing press. Labour has been more fortunate than the professional and clerical classes, who, not being organized, have been left badly in the background. There are now many professors at the University of Vienna earning less than one-third of the wages of skilled artisans. There are teachers, clerks, doctors, journalists, and the like, in a most pitiable plight because they have not the means of forcing the community to pay them higher salaries as the crown depreciates. As for the condition of pensioned teachers and professors and officers, of the half-pay widows and the incapacitated of the war, it is a shame to all European ideals. When the Government halves the value of the crown overnight by printing double the number in circulation—it robs first of all the educated class and the pensioners. It is among these that one must search for the heart-burning sorrows of Vienna—and these are not paraded on the streets.
The most characteristic places of Vienna to-day are the new Wechselstuben or exchange offices, which have sprung up everywhere. Here are such crowds waiting to change their money that you have to wait in a line for your turn. Some of the large banks give a much better exchange than the little ones—and the better the exchange given the longer the queue. The large banks stop public business at half-past twelve, and after that hour is the opportunity of the bucket-shop. If you have little time, or if you lose patience, you run into one of the greedy little bureaus and help to make some one's fortune, not your own. This would not be of much importance for Austria if the people one met waiting in these banks were mostly American, British, French. The sad fact is that the people who are changing their money thus are nearly all Austrian or at least ex-Austrian subjects. The old Austrian empire has been divided into five parts, and each part has a different money which has to be exchanged whenever you come into another part. And there is a great difference in the values of the various moneys. Thus the Hungarian money is worth more than double that of Austria. The twenty, the hundred, the thousand-crown notes are almost identical in appearance and printing—a small imprint of a rubber stamp being in many cases the only distinguishing mark—but even from a waiter in a hotel you can get two thousand Austrian crowns for one thousand Hungarian ones. Roumanian lei are also much the same in appearance. Czech crowns and Serbo-Croat crowns are certainly different. But when your home is in Czecho-Slovakia and your place of business in Austria, and your aged father and mother in Hungary and your uncles and cousins in Croatia, you have a lively time with your money. And it plays prodigiously into the hands of those who have started changing-shops upon the public ways.
An interest in the rate of exchange has developed among the masses of the people, who turn to the financial column of the morning paper as Westerners do to football news or baseball results. There is considerable fluctuation in the values, and it is no doubt possible to make a living by speculation alone, and many people do so. In the banks are, therefore, crowds, both of speculators and of people who have just crossed the frontier and must get their money changed.
The Financial Committee of the League of Nations issuing its report in June foreshadowed the substitution at an early date of a new currency of definite value in gold. The Austrian crowns which are now in use will then suddenly appear in a new light to the deluded Austrian masses. They are probably worth nothing at all, and those who have become rich in them will prove to be rich in nothing. If, however, the peasant is paid for his wheat in the new gold-backed currency he will quickly go ahead in wealth. But if he is paid in gold value, how the cities will starve with their paper!
Between the money-changers in the great streets are the fine Vienna shops exposing elegant craftsmanship of many kinds. Here you can buy rich glass, leather-work, enamelled silver, worked ivory, lace, beautiful bindings, fans, house-ornaments of every conceivable kind in ultra-perfect taste. All that is for sale suggests a luxurious way of life—aristocratic and cultured existence, and certainly not the showy splendour of the parvenu. You will hear it said in other parts of Europe you have still to go to Vienna to buy certain things. As long as the skilled craftsmen and clever workers of many kinds remain, these objects of luxury will be for sale. Besides these, there are, of course, many more ordinary things for which Vienna is noted—velour hats, bronze shoes, and the rest. These, reckoned at world-price figures, are sold at one-third of their value. But there is little market for them.
The next most characteristic things of the city must be the thousands of cafés, where you sit at your coffee surrounded by animated crowds of men reading papers, discussing politics and business, the whole press of Europe at their disposal. Your waiter brings your coffee and automatically at the same time the "Daily Telegraph," or "Figaro," or the "Chicago Tribune," or the "Berliner Tageblatt," or "Obshy Delo," according to your accent and appearance. Time seems to cease to have real value in a café; it is easy to spend hours over one cup of coffee and the newspapers—the difficulty is at last to pay and go.
The restaurants also are full. Though the bread is of rye the meat and potatoes are of the usual quality. Waiters give you white bread surreptitiously. Your hand is below the level of the table and suddenly you find that it is holding a soft roll of white bread. For this you will not be charged in your bill, as it is illegal to sell it you. You pay the waiter when he helps you on with your coat. You can get milk and butter and sugar in this way if you are ready to forget that someone's children may have to do without somewhere in Vienna.
There is an extraordinary diversity of styles and prices at restaurants. A lunch for yourself and three friends will cost three to four thousand crowns at the "Bristol," but the same lunch round the corner goes for five hundred. Going in with a certain M—— to a fashionable restaurant, one could see that the waiters knew him perfectly well, and the head waiter was most affable. But he averred as he looked round the restaurant that there was not an Austrian in the place. None of those who could have been seen there formerly could afford it now. The best cuisine in Vienna was now only at the service of the foreigner.
Hotels, like restaurants, are speculative institutions. But it is difficult to find a room on any terms. Vienna has increased in population and not decreased. She also is crowded with homeless people and refugees. Here are many whose houses are in detached parts of old Austria, now in other States, and they will not go back, or cannot, or are afraid. There are also the Russians once more in great numbers. At the Stadt-theatre, the Moscow Theatre of Art was giving nightly from its repertoire, and it was instructive to see that great theatre packed with Russians, from the stalls to the standing-room at the back of the gallery, all listening intently to "The Three Sisters" of Chekhof; many demonstrations at the end of the performance, too, and making the building resound with Russian cheers and plaudits.