Handbook of Home Rule: Being Articles on the Irish Question
History
Handbook of Home Rule: Being Articles on the Irish Question
Home rule -- Ireland; Ireland -- Politics and government -- 1837-1901; Irish question
in Ireland more smoothly carried into effect by corruption. Hungary,
sullen and discontented, waited for Austria's calamity as her
opportunity, and it came after the battle of Sadowa. Austria had just
emerged from a fearful conflict, and Count Beust[65] felt that unless
some resolute effort was made to meet the views of the constitutional
party in Hungary, the dismemberment of the empire must be the result.
Now, what was the course he took? Was it a tightening of the bonds
between Austria and Hungary? On the contrary, to maintain the unity of
the empire he dissolved its union and restored to Hungary its ancient
constitutional privileges. Austria and Hungary each had its own
Parliament for local purposes. To manage the imperial concerns of peace
and war, and the foreign relations, a controlling body, called the
Delegations, was established, consisting of 120 members, of whom half
represent and are chosen by the Legislature of Austria, and the other
half by that of Hungary; the Upper House of each country returning
twenty members, and the Lower House forty.[66] Ordinarily the delegates
sit and vote in two Chambers, but if they disagree the two branches
must meet together and give their final vote without debate, which is
binding on the whole empire.[67]
The question arises, What is the magnetic influence which induces
communities of men to combine together in federal unions? Undoubtedly it
is the feeling of nationality; and what is nationality? Mr. Mill
says,[68] "a portion of mankind may be said to constitute a nationality
if they are united among themselves by common sympathies which do not
exist between them and any others; which make them co-operate with each
other more willingly than other people; desire to be under the same
government, and desire that it should be a government by themselves or a
portion of themselves exclusively." He then proceeds to state that the
feeling of nationality may have been generated by various causes.
Sometimes it is the identity of race and descent; community of language
and community of religion greatly contribute to it; geographical limits
are one of its causes; but the strongest of all is identity of political
antecedents: the possession of a national history and consequent
community of recollections--collective pride and humiliation, pleasure
and regret--connected with the same incidents in the past.
The only point to be noted further in reference to the foregoing federal
unions, is that the same feeling of nationality which, in the United
States, Switzerland, and the German Empire, produced a closer legal bond
of union, in the case of Austria-Hungary operated to dissolve the
amalgamation formed in 1849 of the two States, and to produce a federal
union of States in place of a single State.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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