to do but to resign, after holding
office for less than three months. The emperor then appointed a ministry of
officials, who were not bound by his pledge, and used paragraph 14 for the
necessary purposes of state. They then made way for a ministry under Herr
v. Koerber. During the early months of 1900 matters were more peaceful, and
Koerber hoped to be able to arrange a compromise; but the Czechs now
demanded the restoration of their language in the internal service of
Bohemia, and on 8th June, by noise and disturbance, obliged the president
to suspend the sitting. The Reichsrath was immediately dissolved, the
emperor having determined to make a final attempt to get together a
parliament with which it would be possible to govern. The new elections on
which so much was to depend did not take place till January 1901. They
resulted in a great increase of the extreme German Nationalist parties.
Schoenerer and the German Radicals--the fanatical German party who in their
new programme advocated union of German Austria with the German empire--now
numbered twenty-one, who chiefly came from Bohemia. They were able for the
first time to procure the election of one of their party in the Austrian
Delegation, and threatened to introduce into the Assembly scenes of
disorder similar to those which they had made common in the Reichsrath. All
those parties which did not primarily appeal to national feeling suffered
loss; especially was this the case with the two sections of the Clericals,
the Christian Socialists and the Ultramontanes; and the increasing enmity
between the German Nationalists (who refused even the name German to a
Roman Catholic) and the Church became one of the most conspicuous features
in the political situation. The loss of seats by the Socialists showed that
even among the working men the national agitation was gaining ground; the
diminished influence of the anti-Semites was the most encouraging sign.

Notwithstanding the result of the elections, the first months of the new
parliament passed in comparative peace. There was a truce between the
nationalities. The Germans were more occupied with their opposition to the
Clericals than with their feud with the Slavs. The Czechs refrained from
obstruction, for they did not wish to forfeit the alliance with the Poles
and Conservatives, on which their parliamentary strength depended, and the
Germans used the opportunity to pass measures for promoting the material
prosperity