or them to obtain
appointments in districts where a knowledge of Czech is required, and the
Germans, therefore, regard every order requiring the use of Czech as an
order which excludes Germans from a certain number of posts. This attitude
of hostility and contempt is strongest among the educated middle class; it
is not shown to the same extent by the clergy and the nobles.

The influence of the Church is also favourable to the Slav races, not so
much from principle as owing to the fact that they supply more candidates
for ordination than the Germans. There is no doubt, however, that the
tendency among Germans has been to exalt the principle of nationality above
religion, and to give it an absolute authority in which the Roman Catholic
Church cannot acquiesce. In this, as in other ways, the Germans in Austria
have been much influenced by the course of events in the German empire.
This hostility of the Church to the German nationalist movement led in 1898
to an agitation against the Roman Catholic Church, and among the Germans of
Styria and other territories large numbers left the Church, going over
either to Protestantism or to Old Catholicism. This "Los von Rom" movement,
which was caused by the continued alliance of the Clerical party with the
Slav parties, is more of the nature of a political demonstration than of a
religious movement.

[Sidenote: German hostility.]

The Germans, so long accustomed to rule, now saw their old ascendancy
threatened, and they defended it with an energy that increased with each
defeat. In 1880 they founded a great society, the _Deutscher Schulverein_,
to establish and assist German schools. It spread over the whole of the
empire; in a few years it numbered 100,000 members, and had an income of
nearly 300,000 gulden; no private society in Austria had ever attained so
great a success. In the Reichsrath a motion was introduced, supported by
all the German Liberal parties, demanding that German should be declared
the language of state and regulating the conditions under which the other
idioms could be recognized; it was referred to a committee from which it
never emerged, and a bill to the same effect, introduced in 1886, met a
similar fate. In Bohemia they demanded, as a means of protecting themselves
against the effect of the language ordinances, that the country should be
divided into two parts; in one German was to be the sole language, in the
other Czech was to be recognized. A proposal