The Sun.
London, England, 1860-04-28 00:00:00

THE LATE BARON BRUCK.

The following sketch of the career of the late
Austrian Finance Minister is taken from " Men of
the Time :"

"Baron Von Charles Louis Bruck, one of the I
most eminent of the modern school of Austrian
statesmen, was born October 18, 1798, in the duchy
of Berg, on the Rhine. The early youth of Bruck
was spent in the army of his country. He made
the campaign of 1814-15 in the Prussian service ;
and on the restoration of peace visited London, to
seek a position in the army of the Hon. East India
Company, but was not successful. Ia the year 1821,
weary of the monotony of garrison life, he set out
for the south of Europe, intending to join the
Greek insurgents, subjects of the Sultan. Arrived
at Trieste, he found some difficulty in procuring a
passage to the scene of his expectations, and im-
proved the interval of delay by making the ac-
quaintance of several persons of considerable local
influence, to whom he was recommended in his
letters. Before he could perfect the arrangements
for his departure he received intelligence from
Greece which convinced him of the hopelessness of
his projected journey. While uncertain as to his
future course of life, overtures were made to him
by Trieste merchants, who had remarked the
energy and practical turn of his character. He re-
solved to accept the appointment of Secre-
tary of the Trieste " Azienda Assicuratrice," a
Maritime Assurance Company, which was obtained
for him through the friendly zeal of Herr von
Beyer • and having married the daughter of Herr
Buschele, another merchant of the same city, thence-
forth regarded Trieste as his home. The Assur-
ance Company failed, and it was Bruck's business
to liquidate its affairs. The skill with which he
accomplished this task so increased his reputation,
that when, in 1830, he came forward with a plan of
fusing all the small maritime assurance societies of
Trieste, and consolidating them into one powerful
association, he found the commercial community
prepared to receive his proposition with a readiness
that revealed the extent of the reputation which, in
a short time, he had acquired. Difficulties presented
themselves on every hand; established interests,
private influence, and the power of custom, had to
be struggled with—and this by a young man, and a
stranger. But to all these Bruck's energy proved
itself superior, and in 1833 he saw his scheme in
operation. This important association, which was
first announced as the Trieste Lloyds, but has long
been known as the Austrian Lloyds, originally con-
fined itself to the business of maritime insurance,
like our own great society of underwriters, from
which it borrowed its name. In 1836, however, it
extended its operations, and sought further to faci-
litate the commerce of the Mediterranean and Levant
by the establishment of a system of steam-packet
communication, which has obtained a world-wide
repute, and is the greatest achievement of unaided
commercial enterprise an Austrian can boast. The
Lloyds packets at first made only the passage be-
tween Trieste and Venice ; they now afford the
traveller the means of conveniently visiting all the
principal seaports of the Adriatic, the Mediter-
ranean, and the Black Sea. Until 1848 Bruck was
the chief director of the Austrian Lloyds. Intent
upon founding a powerful maritime corporation,
capable not only of insuring a mercantile pre-
dominance, with which large returns would be
inevitably connected, but also of determining an im-
mense affiux of business to the port of Trieste, and
of raising the consideration of Austria throughout
the east, Bruck pervailed on the shareholders to
forego a dividend during the early years of the
association, and apply the profits as new capital for
the extension of their undertaking.. At the end of
the year 1846, even before Bruck resigned the active
direction of the Lloyds, the company had a capital
of 3,000,000 florins, and a surplus income, available
for dividends, of 198,000 florins. It has since deve-
loped its resources to a much greater extent; and
although, whether as en insurance or navigation
society, it is immensely inf€rior to our Englidh com-
panies—it is an institution which every Austrian
must regard with national pride. It has contributed
immensely to augment Austrian influence in the
East; it has trebled the population of Trieste, and
caused it to become an important centre of Mediter-
ranean trade ; it has made possible the existence of
an Austrian navy ; and it has done this, doubtless,
under the smile, but without the aid of a Govern-
ment. The year 1848 saw Bruck called to a new
and more prominent scene of activity. The grave
occurrences which at that period shook the founda-
tion of every state in Germany are well known. In
the midst of these, Trieste received a summons to
send its best representative to a national assembly,
to meet at Frankfort, and deliberate on the affairs of
the entire German nation. Bruck was elected by his
fellow-citizens, and was proceeding to the Maine,
when the Imperial Austrian Government appointed
him its Plenipotentiary to the Lieutenant of the Ger-
manic Empire, the Archduke John. The Vienna
Cabinet saw that itlwas!necessary to introduce new,
courageous, and practical men to the service of the
state, and as such Bruck, who, in his character of
member of the Bourse committee had long been in
intercourse with the Government, was recognised
and employed. What fair opportunities were lost
by the representatives of Germany at Frankfort is
too
_well , known. Bruck strove for the unity of
Germany, and strove in vain, During his residence

at Frankfort, however, he immensely increased his
lnowledge of state affairs, and made the acquaint-
ance of distinguished political men from all parts of
Germany. Upon his return from the Maine he was
nominated Minister of Trade, and a member of the
committee for elaborating the Austrian constitution
of March, 1849, since abandoned. The committee
had scarcely completed its work when Bruck was
selected to negotiate with Sardinia. It was the first
time that, in Austria, a merchant had been nomi-
nated ambassador•plenipotentiary, and the employ-
ment was one which the first diplomatists of the
empire would have accepted with pride. He con-
cluded, with Count Revel and General Dabormida,
against the protests of Austrian soldiers and diplo-
matists of the old school, such a peace as Sardinia
could observe without degradation; and he, at the
same time, improved the opportunity to adjust a
frontier question, and some fiscal difficulties con-
nected with the wine and salt trade, which a more
accomplished negotiator might have thought be-
neath his notice or unworthy of the occasion.
The two commercial treaties with Parma
and Modena the latter of which secured
the free navigation of the Po, and prepared
the way for a subsequent postal and customs
union with Austria—were about this time brought
into a very advanced state by the efforts of Bruck.
Upon his return from Italy he devoted himself to
the Ministry of Trade, a department new to the
state system of Austria, and which he had to orga-
nise from its elements. He set resolutely to work,
deposed the incompetent, encouraged the deserving,
and gave scope for latent talent, until his ministry
became a model of order and an example of effi-
ciency. He established a statistical bureau, and
introduced a system of monthly returns; reformed
chambers of commerce; concluded postal treaties
with Bavaria, Prussia, and Saxony; reconstructed
the postal administration of Hungary ; multiplied
post-offices throughout the monarchy ; gave an ex-
tension of 1,000 miles to the electric telegraph ; and
crowned his work by abolishing the interior cus-
toms line, which had separated the kingdom of
Hungary from Austria, and by a revision of the
Imperial tariff. He would have gone further in the
work of reform, but every step he took was against
the passive resistance of a jealous bureaucracy and
the active opposition of a half-enlightened com-
mercial community attached to the prohibitive
system. Within the cabinet he had his opponents,
whom, even with the powerful aid of Prince
Schwarzenberg, his firm friend, he could not always
overcome. He laboured for the emancipation of
trade, and contended at the council board that a
true system of finance must admit and favour the
rapid development of all the resources of the state.
These opinions, and a strong conviction of the neces-
sity of reducing the outgoings of the Imperial Ex-
chequer, brought him into collision with the Finance
Minister, and in May, 1851, he resigned, receiving
the dignity of a Baron of the Austrian Empire.
After his release from the cares of office, Bruck
visited London during the season of the Great Ex-
hibition, and spent the remainder of the year in
Trieste, where he was received with the warmest
demonstrations of regard. In December, 1852, he
was recalled to Vienna and sent to Berlin, where
he negotiated with the Prussian plenipotentiary,
Von Pommeresche, a commercial treaty between
Austria and the Zollverein. Bruck had returned.
Ito Trieste and was occupied in tis favourite pur-
suits, when, in 1853, he was appointed to the most
'important post to which an Austrian diplomatist
could be called—he was nominated Internuncio at
Constantinople. His work was, first, to restore
those earlier friendly relations of Austria with the
Porte which had been so rudely displaced by Count
Leinigen on special mission from Vienna, and
afterwards to maintain the influence of Austria
against that of Russia, France, and England. It
will be admitted that this was no light task, seeing
that the three Powers were respectively making
armed demonstrations, while Austria professed no
more than a neutrality friendly to the Porte.
Whatever opinion may be formed of the policy of
the Austrian Cabinet, there can be no doubt that
it was faithfully represented at Constantinople by
Baron Bruck. Fiom the departure of Prince
Menschikoff from Constantinople (18th May)
to the day of his recall, he was the appointed
protector of the Czar's subjects in Turkey, and at
the same time one of the chief foreign advisers
of the Porte. lii efforts were always directed
to the maintenance or the restoration of peace.
Thus he opposed the declaration of war by the Sul-
tan in 1853, advised the acceptance of the Vienna
note, and opposed, as far as he could, the original
passage of the British fleet through the Dardanelles.
The act with which his name is most permanently
identified is the Convention of June, 1854, by which
Austria gained a splendid military position on the
Danube as far as to the Pruth, without incurring
any further obligation than that of defending the
same. At the commencement of 1855, Bruck was
recalled to Vienna, to take charge of the Ministry
of Finance, vacant by the resignation of Herr von
Braumgarten."

(From the Daily News.)
Austria seems bent upon reviving the choicest
traditions of the Caesars. The winding-up of the
Italian war bids fair to hurry half of the eminent
glen in that Empire to their last account. The
other day it was a General, then an obscure name
or two, and now it is no less a personage than the
Minister of Finance himself, who finds it less diffi•
cult to die than to face an audit. An army sacri-
ficed to jobbers is no new invention ; " there was
once a contractor" is a capital resume of many an
unsuccessful campaign. But a favoured and con-
fidential minister opening his veins and hastening
his exit with a cup of poison is a picture in the man-
ner of that ancient master who burnt as with a hot
iron into the memory of men the names of a Sejanus
and his patron—of a Seneca and his pupil. But
when the Roman wrote, historical Europe was still
young, how much wiser and more humane the
centuries have made us the latest heirs of time !
Our despotisms are enlightened, our erasers most
religious and apostolical ; and we never hear of a
monarch deliberately punishing with an ignomi-
nious death the desperate fidelity of a Minister, or
politely suggesting to a prosy old philosopher to
make himself scarce by the gentle application of a
lancet in a warm bath. In Austria, for example—
the keystone of the arch of European order, the
citadel of divine right—the stronghold of pure
manarchical principle—the quiet way in which an
able and energetic Minister of Finance is suddenly
announced to be " out of office," and the imposing
ceremony with which he takes leave of his re-,
sponsibilities, are a vast improvement upon the
manners and customs of the Court of a Domitian.
Tacitus has nothing more remarkable to relate than
an occasional hint from the Emperor to some ob,
noxious or inconvenient subject to try a change of
air in the Elysian Fields. In our highly civilised
epoch it is not permitted to a Minister of State to
take himself off on such easy terms. Poor Baron
Bruck, with the merciless precision and complete-
ness of a man of business accustomed to liquidations
on the largest scale, cuts his throat from end to end,
and both his wrists into the bargain, and to make
the final settlement doubly sure and expeditious,
drinks some solution of all earthly difficulties. It
was reserved to Austria to surpass all her brilliant
reactions and•revivals by this ghastly parody of
the administration of the erasers.

Are we, then, to be told that the cause of pro-
gress is compromised in that unfortunate Empire
by the terrible fate of the only man who represented
modern ideas at the Court of Francis Joseph ? Let
us be careful how we point the moral of a tale of
which we know neither the beginning nor the end.
From as much as the official journals of the Aus-
trian Government have ventured to reveal we might,
even without any affected reticence, hesitate to ad-
mit the conclusion that this illustrious and unhappy
man was a culprit rather than a victim.
Conjectures, in the absence of known facts, are
scattered broadcast on every page of history far
less credible; theories more ingenious, no doubt,
but far less consistent with probability than one
which might describe the death of Baron Bruck
as the despair of a statesman tasked beyond ins
strength, driven mad by the obstinacy and perver-
sity of the fools and bigots whom he served, and by
the forecast of insurmountable calamities. The
position of a Finance Minister in Austria is no post
of honour or of ease in these latter days,-and the
successor to Baron Bruck will be a prodigy of indif-
ference or of strength if he prove happier in his
outgoing:than the colleague of Stadion and Schwar-
zenberg.
It is no concern of ours to attempt to vindi-
cate the reputation of a man who has fled to a tri•
bunal from which there is no appeal. A bloody
shroud is the common destiny of the best and the
worst under such a Government as the Austrian.
Certain it is that Baron Bruck, who at the age
• of sixty-two, in the maturity of his fame, in the
enjoyment of all the rewards of fortune, has taken
refuge from Imperial justice in the accusing silence
of the grave, is the man of all others to whom the
Austria of our day owes whatever of vitality it still
preserves. And be his errors or his crimes what they
may, not only Austria bat all Germany is under kin
obligation to that Prussian soldier of 1814—that
merchant of Trieste who founded the Austrian

Lloyds—that representative at the National As-
sembly of Frankfort in '4B who contended for
German unity—that 'Minister of Trade who con-
cluded a beaty of commerce between Austria and
the Zollverein----that diplomatist who sustained the
influence of Austria in the East during the Rus-
sian war—that Minister who revised the. tariff,
reformed the postal service, resisted bigotry and
privilege in every degree, restrained the bureau-
cracy, and by his fertility of resource, and energy
of combination, alone for years preserved an empire
wasted by intestine conflicts from irrecoverable
ruin. If Baron Bruck, absolutely without tempta-
tion, was really the corner-stone of a gigantic arch
of fraud, whom ought we blame—the man or the
system ? What impulse, what reward, what recog-
nition has honest public service in Austria? Pub-
lic service ! Why, there is no such thing as public
service in a State where an Emperor is all in all
—where good and bad men alike breathe a stifling
atmosphere of secrecy and repression which re-
laxes the conscience, enslaves the intellect, corrupts
the heart. Even in a free country Baran Bruck
might perhaps have languished in a counting-
house ; but as a statesman in a free country he
would have lived and died without a stain.