for separate local institutions, so that they should no longer be governed
from Innsbruck. The Italian-speaking population on the coast of Dalmatia
only asked that the government should uphold them against the pressure of
the Slav races in the interior, and for this reason were ready to support
the German constitutionalists.

[Sidenote: German Constitutional party.]

The party of centralization was then the Liberal German party, supported by
a few Italians and the Ruthenes, and as years went by it was to become the
National German party. They hoped by a common parliament to create the
feeling of a common Austrian nationality, by German schools to spread the
use of the German language. Every grant of self-government to the
territories must diminish the influence of the Germans, and bring about a
restriction in the use of the German language; moreover, in countries such
as Bohemia, full self-government would almost certainly mean that the
Germans would become the subject race. This was a result which they could
not accept. It was intolerable to them that just at the time when the
national power of the non-Austrian Germans was so greatly increased, and
the Germans were becoming the first race in Europe, they themselves should
resign the position as rulers which they had won during the last three
hundred years. They maintained, moreover, that the ascendancy of the
Germans was the only means of preserving the unity of the monarchy; German
was the only language in which the different races could communicate with
one another; it must be the language of the army, the civil service and the
parliament. They laid much stress on the historic task of Austria in
bringing German culture to the half-civilized races of the east. They
demanded, therefore, that all higher schools and universities should remain
German, and that so far as possible the elementary schools should be
Germanized. They looked on the German schoolmaster as the apostle of German
culture, and they looked forward to the time when the feeling of a common
Austrian nationality should obscure the national feeling of the Slavs, and
the Slavonic idioms should survive merely as the local dialects of the
peasantry, the territories becoming merely the provinces of a united and
centralized state. The total German population was not quite a third of the
whole. The maintenance of their rule was, therefore, only possible by the
exercise of great political ability, the more so, s