IMPERIAL CHANCERY DECREES AND DANUBE PACKET MOVEMENTS: A Chronicle of Viennaβs Commercial Arteries
From our Vienna Correspondent. The Wiener Zeitung of the 27th instant, that austere oracle of the Imperial Chancery, hath published a series of decrees touching the commercial tariffs of the Crownlands, which, though couched in the dry language of the chancery, bear grave import for the merchants of the Danube. By these instruments, the duties upon salt, iron, and woollen stuffs, conveyed by river packet from Linz and Passau, are adjusted anew; and the tolls exacted at the custom-houses of Stein and Krems are henceforth to be levied with a precision that shall admit of no evasion. The Imperial Government, ever vigilant for the prosperity of its subjects, hath likewise ordained that the packet-boats plying between Vienna and Pesth shall maintain a stricter schedule, so that the mails and the merchandise of the East may be transported with greater celerity.
Nor are these decrees the sole matter of interest. The same journal records the movements of the Danubian packets, those floating caravans which, by the power of steam, have annihilated the ancient delays of wind and current. On the 25th, the 'Arpad' departed from the quay at Rossau, laden with Moravian cloth and Bohemian glass; on the 26th, the 'Maria Anna' arrived from Presburg, her decks crowded with passengers and her hold fragrant with the wines of the Hegyalja. Such intelligence, though trivial to the uninitiated, is the very pulse of our commercial life; for upon these vessels depend the fortunes of many a house in Vienna and in the distant provinces.
Yet, amidst these records of prosperity, the antiquarian eye discerns a melancholy truth. The old river-banks, where once the barges of the Boyars moored, are now lined with steam-packet stations; the ancient tolls, once paid in kind or in rude coin, are commuted into silver florins; and the chronicles of the fortress-princes, who once held the Danube in fee, are consigned to the dust of archives. It is our duty, as Chief Archivist, to preserve what remains of those elder days, lest the very memory of the old charters be swept away by the relentless tide of modern commerce.
Let it be recorded, therefore, that on this day the Wiener Zeitung hath published decrees which, while they bind the present, also serve to remind us of the past. The Danube flows on, bearing the wealth of empires; but the historian, like the ferryman, must ever look both to the shore he leaves and to the shore he seeks.