Note (Back) — Chapter XXV

528. Rule of the German Liberals, 1871-1879.—With a cabinet presided over by Prince Adolf Auersperg the German Liberals then returned to power. Their tenure was prolonged to 1879 and might have been continued beyond that date but for the recurrence of factional strife within their ranks. The period was one in which some of the obstructionist groups, notably the Czechs, fell into division among themselves, so that the opposition which the Liberals were called upon to encounter was distinctly less effective than otherwise it might have been. At no time since 1867 had the Czechs consented to be represented in the Reichsrath, a body, indeed, which they had persisted in refusing to recognize as a legitimately constituted parliament of the Empire. During the early seventies a party of Young Czechs sprang up which advocated an abandonment of passive resistance and the substitution of parliamentary activity in behalf of the interests of the race. The Old Czechs were unprepared for such a shift of policy, and in 1873 they played directly into the hands of the Liberal government by refusing to participate in the consideration of the electoral reform by which the choice of representatives was taken from the provincial diets and vested in the four classes of provincial constituencies. For the carrying of this measure a two-thirds majority was required, and if the Czechs had been willing to vote at all upon it they might easily have compassed its defeat. As it was, the amendment was carried without difficulty. A tenure of power which not even the financial crisis of 1873 could break was, however, sacrificed through factional bickerings. Within both the ministry and the Reichsrath, the dominant party broke into three groups, and the upshot was the dissolution, February 6, 1879, of the ministry and the creation of a new one under the presidency of Count Taaffe, long identified with the Moderate element. Three months later the House of Representatives was dissolved. In the elections that followed the Liberals lost a total of forty-five seats, and therewith their position as the controlling party in both the Reichsrath and the nation. Taaffe retained the premiership, but his Liberal colleagues were replaced by Czechs, Poles, Clericals, and representatives indeed of pretty nearly all of the existing groups save the Germans.[677]