BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 91 



and a new opera, nor the pages of any recent literary success, 

 nor yet a woodland scene of exquisite grandeur, but they would 

 be the impressions of the daily life of a people in remote valleys 

 of Austria. This peasantry leads a life of toil incessant, un- 

 fruitful, and hopeless, with no other outlook beyond the life 

 their fathers led before them, with no other promise than the 

 promise held out by the wide-stretching arms of Rome to her 

 faithful children, in lieu of their allegiance. Not an unusual 

 picture outside of Austria. 



A people bound by an iron band of authority, forged by 

 church and state, from whose clasp there is no escape, A 

 happy people withal, the discontented possibly the exception; 

 but happy only through an enforced ignorance of the truth; 

 the awful reality of their own helplessness and hopelessness. 

 Any day the clisillusion may come. How unprepared are 

 these people for disclosures ! Can their condition be imagined 

 at the awakening? 



A people whose lands are taxed and mortgaged, only the 

 strenuous exertion of united family labor, and that is barely 

 enough, to meet their obligations. The money from this labor 

 goes for the sustainment and support of the nobility, and the 

 leisure classes. What are their lives? Very little beyond a 

 round of useless charities, pleasures, and idleness in the cities. 

 There is no need to enumerate in detail. Their lives are well 

 enough known to all. They do not want for bread. Whilst 

 the blood of the worn, scantily fed, meanly housed, poorly 

 clothed workers is shed, literally drop by drop, for beings call- 

 ing themselves human but in fact incarnations of aimless- 

 ness. This contrast, so unjust, so inhuman, opposed to the 

 teachings of the Nazarene whom all in that land profess to 

 revere cannot be portrayed by words. The condition must 

 be seen to be felt. 



In conversing with men and women belonging to the titled 

 classes in Austria, I gathered that the desire on the part of 

 the majority of these persons was only an echo of a common 

 feeling to discourage the education of the poorer classes be- 

 yond a very limited standard. Others went so far as to pro- 

 nounce all education for these classes baneful, as leading to 



