No. 34.
Mr. Kasson
to Mr. Evarts.
Vienna, June 29, 1878. (Received July 13.)
Sir: The various questions pending between Austria and Hungary, which have impeded the conclusion of a new compromise to take the place of that of 1867, which was limited in duration to ten years, have now been adjusted, and the various laws which constitute the new adjustment, binding on the two halves of the empire, received the imperial approval on the 27th instant.
The most important of these are: 1. The assumption of the debt due the Austrian Bank of eighty millions of florins (of which I have before written) by the Austrian and Hungarian Governments respectively, in their fixed proportions. 2. The customs-tariff act, which remains in substance in the terms last communicated by this legation to the Department. (So soon as I can procure an authentic printed copy of this act, I will forward it for the use of the Treasury Department at Washington.) 3. The act regulating the quota to be contributed by each portion of the empire to the current expenses of the common government. 4. The national-bank act which changes the name of the existing institution from that of the Austrian National Bank to that of Austro-Hungarian, with a bureau and portion of its capital at Buda-Pesth, as well as at Vienna. This re-establishment of a common constitution, obligatory on both Austria and Hungary, has greatly relieved the situation in which the common imperial ministry found itself in presence of the complications of the Oriental question. The government will now feel itself much stronger in the demands it has to make of the congress at Berlin. The evidence of this feeling is already apparent in the increased vigor of its military movements on the frontier and in the firmness with which its demands are expressed.
I will write more fully of this adjustment so soon as I shall have recovered from an illness which now confines me to my chamber.
I have, &c.,