From the Imperial Capital: Chancery Decrees, Packet Movements, and Tariff Edicts Along the Danubian Corridor

VIENNA, 18th September 1841. — The Wiener Zeitung of this day, organ of the Imperial Chancery, hath published a series of decrees touching the commercial intercourse of the Austrian Crownlands. By these instruments, the tariff upon saltpetre, hemp, and wrought iron descending the Danube from the Hungarian interior is adjusted anew, with schedules appended in the most precise tabular form. The duties upon foreign cottons entering by way of the Bohemian frontier are likewise augmented, a measure attributed by the gazette to the exigencies of the Imperial Treasury and the protection of domestic looms in Moravia and Silesia.

From the river packet office, the movement of vessels is recorded with that methodical exactness which characteriseth the Austrian bureaucracy. The steamer Radetzky, of three hundred tons burden, departed Pest on the fourteenth instant, bearing hides, wool, and forty passengers of mercantile condition, and was signalled at Pressburg on the sixteenth. The Franz I. ascended from Vienna on the fifteenth with government dispatches and a detachment of engineers bound for the fortifications at Komorn. Low water at the Strudel and the Wirbel has obliged several barges to lighter their cargoes, and the tolls at the Iron Gate are collected under the new schedule with rigour.

Of peculiar interest to the antiquarian is the appended commercial intelligence from the Banat and Transylvania, wherein the export of timber, salt, and quicksilver from the mines of the Carpathian border is enumerated. The gazette notes a decline in the overland trade by the Rothenthurm Pass, owing to the recent repair of the military road, which hath diverted waggons to the valley of the Olt. Such minutiae, though dry to the general reader, are the very sinews of our chronicle; for in the ledger of the customs-house lieth the true history of the realm, more faithfully than in the panegyrics of court orators.

Let it be recorded, therefore, that on this eighteenth day of September, in the year of grace one thousand eight hundred and forty-one, the Empire of Austria declareth her commercial will from the chancery of Vienna, and the Danube beareth it upon her waters from the Bavarian marches to the Black Sea. The archivist, poring over these columns, doth perceive how the present hour is woven of tariffs and packet-schedules; yet beneath them all run the older threads of treaty and charter, some of which — as I have cause to know — are not what they seem. Thus doth the Gazette of the Empire serve at once as ledger and as labyrinth.