A ROTTEN EMPIRE.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXV, Issue 67, 22 March 1915, Page 4

A ROTTEN EMPIRE.

A special writer in the London News and Loader discusses, at the end of January, Austria and its parlous state. He points out that this Empire lias had more hard things said about it than any 6ave that of the Turk, and it has deserved them more. Gladstone called it ''the negation of God" and Bismarck likened it to a ramshackle house built with

bad bricks and only held together by the German cement. It was said long ago that if Austria did not exist it would have to he invented. He goes on to say : The truth is that it has the appearance of an "invention"—a thing that has been pioced together out of disparate material rather than of a thing that has grown out of the soil. It is as transparently artificial as Mrs Gamp's curls which -were so obviously false that they could not be said to he a. deception. Falstaff said that Squire Shallow was like a man made out of cheeseparings after supper. Austriat-Hungary is hardly more real than that. It is like a moth-eaten structure that has long been uninhabitable, but which has ■heen allowed to stand just as the Venetian Empire was allowed to stand until Napoleon came with his whiff of grapeshot and reality and crumbled it to dust. For a generation the prophets have prophesied disaster and always the time of disaster was the same. When Francis Joseph dies, then. . . . But Joseph clings tenaciously to life, and Berlin drives Austria to her doom.