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.
At Vienna you naturally spend some evenings at the theatre and the
opera. It is famous for its stage. There, however, you do realize how
Vienna has fallen. The theatres are all full, but not full of the sort
of people who demand excellence. Perhaps it would be unfair to judge
the opera by a performance of "Parsifal," that heavily over-dressed
story of sentimental religiosity and pedestrian symbolism, but it was
done in the most slatternly perfunctory style. The theatre was
crowded. But it was a strangely mixed crowd. In lonely grandeur in
one of the boxes were three Englishmen in evening dress. In the fifth
row of the stalls was a servant-girl who kept asking her neighbours the
time in the midst of Parsifal's mystical moments. It was her night
out, but she had to be home by ten. She looked at the play with her
mouth, and lolled to and fro. Occasionally some people down below set
about clapping, but were silenced by hisses from the people up above,
who hissed down all claps: the theme was too holy. However, in the
entr'acts, how the beer flowed in the buffet. It was not too holy to
drink beer.
"The profiteers have all the seats in the theatres," say the cultivated
Austrians. "They don't understand opera and serious drama, but it has
the name, and they could not afford to go before, so they go now. It
is only the people in the gallery who know what is good."
"The people in the gallery always know that," said I. "It is the
people in the circles who are not sure."
"What I mean is, the people who used to have stalls are now in the
gallery, and the people who formerly never came to a theatre are now in
the stalls," said the Austrian solemnly.
The intelligent Austrians are in a very gloomy frame of mind. Although
the Government is nominally Christian-Socialist, it is very weak and
practically unable to cope with the Communist and extreme Radical
elements. It is a common opinion that Austria lies almost as low as
Russia. "The social destruction of Russia is being done bloodlessly in
Austria. The working class is well-off; every one else, except the
speculators, is in poverty," said Dr. B.
"We have the officials for a first-class State, and the need for the
number of a third-class one," said Capt. S. "Our army now, the new
army which we have obtained, is the worst army ever known in any
country. I have been in Haiti, and the Haitians are splendid fellows
compared with them. Our soldiers are merely a bodyguard for the
Socialists, and robbers all. The true army, that went through the
unspeakable sufferings of the war, was turned on the streets to starve.
Austria may have been serving a bad case, but the army was not to
blame--it was doing its duty. But there is one humble consolation now;
we have a condition of affairs in Austria which cannot continue.
Austria has become an economic plague-spot in Europe."
"It would interest me to have your opinion," I asked. "Has Austria a
national spirit? Does the heart respond to its name?"
Capt. S. thought not. "I favour union with Germany as the only issue.
Few would grieve if 'Austria' were no more. We are German, and the
idea of union with Germany has now made considerable progress with the
people. But it is possible that the idea is not so popular in Germany.
It would be a grave responsibility to unite any country with the
financial and political wreck which we have here."
I put this question of the future of Austria to a Monarchist. He did
not favour the idea of a union with Germany, but of a renewed union
with Hungary. He still believed the Hapsburgs could return.
I put it to a working man, but he favoured the State as it was. If
only the cost of living could be brought down it would be a very fine
State, as wages were so high.
The Petite Entente of Czecho-Slovakia, Serbia, and Roumania, is
strongly opposed to a reunion of Austria and Hungary, and would stop it
by force of arms. The Czechs are equally opposed to union with Germany.
"So what do you say?" I asked of a Czech. "Do you think that what is
left of Austria ought to be divided up between her neighbours?"
"God forbid!" said he. "We've got enough Germans in Czecho-Slovakia
already. Austria can very well exist by herself. Does not Switzerland
exist by herself, and do very well, without half the natural advantages
of the new Austria?"
The French solution for the problem is known to lie in the possible
detachment of Bavaria from Germany, and the setting up of a new
South-German State in union with Austria. Only on such terms would
France agree to Austria joining part of Germany. The Bavarians,
however, show no signs of desiring to cut loose from the still great
German confederation. A purely deliberative plebiscite taken in the
Austrian Tyrol is all for union with Germany. A similar plebiscite in
the province of Salzburg shows the same tendency, another in Styria is
certain to go the same way. These plebiscites are called passive
propaganda by the French, and they for their part egg on the Petite
Entente to stop them. But there seems little doubt that were Austria
free to choose she would now give up her name and fame, and merge
herself in the German whole of which, ethnographically, she is a
natural part.
How strange that all the luxury and glamour of Vienna, as you see it at
this moment, is the concomitant of complete decline and mortal peril.
In arriving in the city one felt at last that one was in Europe, but it
proves to be not the Europe of the future. Vienna in 1921 is part of
the sunset of that old radiant, peaceful Europe we knew before the war.
Night has to swallow it up, and the future lies on other horizons, in
Prague and Belgrade and Budapest, in the capitals of that new Europe
which arises from the defeat and ruin of the war.
N.B.--By Article 10 of the Treaty of Versailles, "Germany recognises
and respects strictly the independence of Austria, and recognises that
this independence is inalienable unless the League of Nations gives
consent to change." And by Article 88 of the Treaty of Saint-Germain
Austria engages "to abstain from all acts calculated to prejudice her
independence either directly or indirectly."
[1] Travellers to Austria are seldom warned beforehand that there is an
internal and external rate of exchange, and they frequently lose 50% on
the exchange of their money.
EXTRA LEAVES
(iii) _On Money and League of Nations Currency_
In the course of this little tour of Europe I bought 1,000 francs and
4,000 liras, and 1,500 drachmas, 3,000 dinars, and the same number of
levas, some lei and 20,000 piastres, 7,000 Hungarian crowns and 32,000
Austrian crowns, 3,000 Czech crowns, 10,000 German marks, 15,000 odd
Polish marks, 500 Belgian francs, and some paper money of the
principality of Monaco.
You have to be somewhat of an arithmetician to think one week in
piastres and the next in dinars, and the next in crowns, and the next
in marks. You are always losing but you always think you are winning.
You afford pleasure to strangers whenever you go because you can be
robbed so easily and safely. In each country you can be robbed coming
in and robbed going out and generally robbed in between. You do not
mind very much, it is part of the legitimate expense of modern travel.
You accumulate great wads of paper. See the people of Vienna and
Warsaw, their inside pockets are all misshapen by the bulge of the
money. The pockets of an international traveller are worse. He holds
his unnegotiable accumulation of the money which is not worth changing
nor yet worth throwing away.
"How much do you expect to get for this?" said a Hungarian banker
surveying a bulky packet of Turkish piastres. I mentioned a likely sum.
"_Grande erreur_!" he exclaimed, and lifted his hands in horror. In
Budapest they were marketable only for a tenth of what I gave for them.
So the piastres remained together with provincial French notes and
small denominations of dinars and what-not, nominally worth something
somewhere, but in fact unsaleable.
The Germans have just now a very popular word for a _nouveau-riche_, it
is a _schieber_, one who exchanges. Getting your money changed is one
of the most wasteful processes for you and one of the most gainful for
him.
A certain man had 10 pounds which he exchanged for 450 francs. Then he
exchanged the francs for 600 lira; he journeyed by Fiume to Serbia and
changed again for 900 dinars. At Belgrade he bought 6,000 Hungarian
crowns. He carried the money to Budapest and then to Vienna, where he
had some luck and got 15,000 Austrian crowns. However, at Prague the
bankers said they did not encourage the sale of Austrian money as they
did not know what it was worth. He got 1,000 Czech crowns, which in
turn he changed to 10,000 Polish marks. He then changed those for 500
Roumanian lei, returned to Poland again and only received 8,000 marks
at the re-exchange. At Berlin they looked very disparagingly at the
Polish money and offered him 280 German marks for the lot. He changed
this for 11 florins in Amsterdam, for which when he reached Antwerp he
received 40 Belgian francs. His 10 pounds lingered tentatively over
the abyss of a nothing.
The title of this story should be "Exchange is no robbery."
A golden or at least a paper rule for merchants dealing with foreign
firms is "pay them when the exchange is most in your favour." But the
foreign firm under these circumstances, having expected to get so much,
gets in reality so much less. It is not surprising then that trade is
sticky.
We hear much of the efforts of Governments and financiers to regulate
the exchanges, but nothing comes of it. The only obvious cure is a
Utopian one: institute one currency for Europe in the name of the
League of Nations.
Let us have "League of Nations gold currency." But to have that the
resources of Europe must be pooled. We are not ready for that.
LETTERS OF TRAVEL
IX. FROM PRAGUE
Czecho-slovakia is the watchdog of the new peace in Central Europe.
She is the strongest new power, and is manifestly the best governed
State which has arisen out of the ruins of the old. The new Bohemia
(for Czecho-Slovakia is truly Bohemia) is a much more credible
resurrection than the new Poland. One London daily refused to believe
in the existence of Czecho-Slovakia for a long while. "Unless I see
it," said the editor, "I will not be convinced." But Czecho-Slovakia
is quite convincing--and is much less of a Frankenstein than
Jugo-slavia. The Czechs are no doubt obscurely placed in Europe, but
the traveller when he gets to their country--not the "seacoast of
Bohemia"--will find that they make good showing.
Prague is a fine old city on the rolling Moldau--what a fine name,
suggestive of rolling boulders down from the hills! Ancient Prague has
this river for its moat. It rises on heights from old bridges to the
royal palace and cathedral of the old kings of Bohemia. The new city
has yet to be built. It will be on the level ground below, where there
is to-day an agglomeration of shops and hotels as yet unworthy of the
capital of a great new State. Here up above is all that is worth
while, though seen from the battlements, the new below, especially on a
cloudy day with lowering skies, is a very fine view. Here lie the old
kings of Bohemia--one of them apparently "Good King Wenceslas." Here
at a little distance are the mysterious walls with sentries posted at
the gates--walls curiously and accidentally associated in the minds of
thousands of children with Longfellow's lines:
I have read in some old, marvellous tale
That a midnight host of spectres pale
Beleaguered the walls of Prague.
Not a good place in which to lose yourself at night--outside these
walls--as a party of us found on our first expedition there.
In the royal palace and offices are now accommodated the various
ministeries of the new republic. Up in this purer air live also the
President, M. Masaryk, and some of the diplomatic representatives of
foreign powers. It is no doubt rare in this lazy age to find a new
State administered and governed from the top of a crag, a steep climb
on foot. But Czecho-Slovakia and Prague are governed from a mountain,
and have the mountain point of view, which is the view of youth and
vision.
The new State has some thirteen millions of inhabitants, and the
majority of the people speak both Czech and German. German is
naturally discouraged as being anti-national, and it is now only used
in emergencies. All names of places have been Slavonized. Even
Carlsbad and Marienbad are now Carlovivari and Mariansky Laznie. Where
names of places have to be printed both in German and in Czech--German
goes into small letters and Czech into large. After the armistice was
declared in 1918, it only took a few hundred Czechs to overthrow the
Austrian power and proclaim a new national republic. It was a
bloodless revolution.
France and England were benevolently disposed toward a Czech republic,
but America, thanks to the influence of the Slavophile millionaire,
Charles Crane, with Wilson, and to the personal prestige of Masaryk,
did most to confirm and strengthen Czecho-Slovakia. Gratitude to
America is expressed everywhere, and Prague, in 1921, is perhaps the
one capital in the world where Wilson's name and fame are still
undimmed. Is not Wilson's face in bas-relief on the wall of the main
station, "Gare Wilson," supported, curiously enough, by the admiring
figures of two Bacchantes wreathed in the vine? It counts more to be
an American in Prague than to be English. Crane's son is Minister for
the United States; Crane's daughter-in-law, as painted by Mucha, is
engraved on the new hundred-crown note. American relief-work and Mr.
Hoover enjoy great prestige, and altogether there is for the time being
the atmosphere of an enduring friendship.
The Czechs adopted a Parliamentary system, but finding that "one man
one vote" brought to power new revolutionary elements, the system was
quickly defunctionized. The administration is now appointed by the
President, and he, having been elected by acclamation, "President for
life," is in the nature of elective autocrat. However, after Masaryk,
the term is to be limited to seven years, and a president may not serve
two terms. The largest parties in the Parliament are the "Germans" and
the "Social Democrats," each of which has seventy-two deputies and
about forty senators. The National Democrats, who might be called the
Masaryk party, are in the minority of nineteen deputies and ten
senators. This party, nevertheless, is likely to maintain and hold the
intellectual leadership of the nation. Czecho-Slovakia is not a
peasant State like Bulgaria and Jugo-Slavia, but ex-Austrian bourgeois,
with a large proportion of educated people.
It is a thick-set, burly, rather obstinate people, with imperturbable
eyes. It is difficult to persuade one of the Czechs to do a thing
against his will, or to compromise between his opinion and yours. Much
more difficult to persuade than a Russian. And they are not as
obedient as the Germans, or as amenable to splitting a difference as
the British. It has been said they are Russian translated into German.
Not polite or charming, but matter-of-fact, and a trifle on the rude
side. There is in them a good deal of moderateness of gift, but they
seem far more practical than the rest of the Slavs, and more virile.
They have been Germanized and dullened by Austria, but in many respects
they are more capable than the Germans. They seem to be the most
capable people in their part of the world.