New Cabinet

A short, blue-eyed man, clad in the street garb of a priest, hurried last week into the great building which houses the Nationalrat (Parliament) in Vienna. As he passed through gloomy corridors only the sharp-eyed saw at this seeming-priest's throat the purple rabat of a monsignor. None the less all present bowed with respect to Mgr. Ignaz Seipel. He had just been created--for the second time;-- Chancellor (Premier) of Austria. He is thus at present the sole Christian prelate to head a civil government.

Political Paradox. Mgr. Seipel (Christian Socialist) succeeds as Chancellor, Dr. Rudolf Ramek, also a Christian Socialist. Not only is the new Chancellor of the same party as his predecessor, but they are both agreed on the fundamental policy of resistance to the incessant demands of Austria's organized state employes for higher pay.

Why then, if Chancellor Ramek was forced to resign because he resisted the organized bureaucrats (TIME, Oct. 25), was he replaced by Chancellor Seipel who will resist still more vigorously?

Personal Triumph. Explanation lies in the fact that the potent Christian Socialist-Party controls sufficient votes to control the Chancellory, but is divided within itself on the question of "states rights" for the Austrian provinces v. pan-Austrian "centralism." Dr. Ramek, leader of the former group, waxed potent two years ago, and usurped the Chancellory (TIME, Dec. 1, 1924) from Mgr. Seipel, Chancellor then as now, when the latter was under fire (TIME, Nov. 17, 1924) for not raising the salaries of Austria's state-employed railway workers.

Since then the Christian Socialist pendulum has swung back to Mgr. Seipel, and last week brought him again into power on the upsurge of a great personal triumph. The new Cabinet is identical with the resigned cabinet of former Chancellor Ramek with four exceptions.

Unique. Born 50 years ago in Vienna, young Ignaz Seipel became first a priest, and then a professor who mingled strangely political science with moral theology in such books as The Economic Teaching of the Fathers (1907). Later his writings upon statecraft in support of the Austro-Hungarian Empire won him the approval of the Habsburgs and during the World War, a cabinet post.

With the crumbling of Austria-Hungary he proved himself adaptable to new conditions and became within two years the undisputed leader of the Christian Socialist Party.

From that vantage point he scanned the then desperate financial morass of Austria and displayed the courage, vision and leadership to persuade his people to seek financial rehabilitation through virtually placing the national finances in the hands of a receiver: The League of Nations. As everyone knows League fiscal control of Austria was terminated only this year (TIME, July 12) after the country had made one of the most sensationally rapid fiscal recoveries in history. Perhaps never before did a statesman lead his people in the unprecedented course of placing their national purse strings in foreign hands.

*Actually the "conservative" party of republican Austria. From this misnomer arises the paradox presented by Chancellor Seipel when, though a Socialist, he dons ecclesiastical robes and celebrates mass as the politico-religious hero of Austrian Catholics.