20 SPORT IN EUROPE 



as governed it in feudal times. Feudal days in Austria are not in 

 the remote antiquity of bygone centuries, for, while in England the 

 great social upheaval of the seventeenth century ended the last 

 traces of feudal conditions, and in France the same occurred more 

 than a hundred years ago, Austria's aristocracy was not shorn of 

 its ancient manorial privileges until much later. The great change 

 worked by the Revolution of 1848 was not brought about by civil 

 war or great bloodshed. There was no "reign of terror," no 

 wholesale sacking of chateaux ; hence the relations between the 

 aristocracy and the peasantry were never strained to that extreme 

 point of class-hatred that made the French Revolution one of the 

 most terrible events in history. Easy-going good-nature is a marked 

 characteristic of the Austrian people, from the highest to the lowest, 

 and this has also largely contributed to a survival of conditions 

 without which sport in civilised communities becomes either im- 

 possible or a farce. 



" Money does not talk over here," an American friend visiting 

 Austria once remarked to me, when I explained to him why the self- 

 advertising spirit created by newly-acquired wealth had so far left 

 Austria to its medieval conditions ; and I think he was right. 



Of the several resultant conditions, none are perhaps more striking 

 to a stranger than the pleasant entente cordiale existing as a rule 

 between territorial magnates and their one-time serfs, and the lenorth 

 of time that sporting estates remain in one family. From this springs 

 the reluctance even to lease sporting rights to strangers. These rights 

 are not considered in Austria as a ready asset whereby an annual 

 income from ever-changing tenants should be raised, however much 



