oclamation in which he cast himself on the loyalty of his faithful
provinces, and, while confirming the concessions of March, ignored those of
the 15th of May. The flight of the emperor had led to a revulsion of
feeling in Vienna; but the issue of the proclamation and the attempt of the
government to disperse the students by closing the university, led to a
fresh outbreak on the 26th. Once more the ministry conceded all the demands
of the insurgents, and even went so far as to hand over the public treasury
and the responsibility of keeping order to a newly constituted Committee of
Public Safety.

[Sidenote: National movements.]

The tide was now, however, on the turn. The Jacobinism of the Vienna
democracy was not really representative of any widespread opinion even in
the German parts of Austria, while its loud-voiced Germanism excited the
lively opposition of the other races. Each of these had taken advantage of
the March troubles to press its claims, and everywhere the government had
shown the same yielding spirit. In Bohemia, where the attempt to hold
elections for the Frankfort parliament had broken down on the opposition of
the Czechs and the conservative German aristocracy, a separate constitution
had been proclaimed on the 8th of April; on March the 23rd the election by
the diet of Agram of Baron Joseph Jellachich as ban of Croatia was
confirmed, as a concession to the agitation among the southern Slavs; on
the 18th of March Count Stadion had proclaimed a new constitution for
Galicia. Even where, as in the case of the Serbs and Rumans, the government
had given no formal sanction to the national claims, the emperor was
regarded as the ultimate guarantee of their success; and deputations from
the various provinces poured into Innsbruck protesting their loyalty.

To say that the government deliberately adopted the Machiavellian policy of
mastering the revolution by setting race against race would be to pay too
high a compliment to its capacity. The policy was forced upon it; and was
only pursued consciously when it became obvious. Count Stadion began it in
Galicia, where, before bombarding insurgent Cracow into submission (April
26), he had won over the Ruthenian peasants by the abolition of feudal dues
and by forwarding a petition to the emperor for the official recognition of
their language alongside Polish. But the great object lesson was furnished
by the events in Prague, where the quarrel between Czechs and Ge