Wieser’s article uses income-tax statistics to assess the relative strength of Germans and Czechs in Bohemia. Moving from Austrian statecraft through territorial and income comparisons to the strategic importance of Prague, it argues that population shares cannot adequately determine national political standing. Economic achievement supplies evidence of collective capacity and, in Wieser’s German-national interpretation, a claim to political influence.
Das Sprichwort sagt zwar, daß Probieren über Studieren geht, aber für die Staatskunst kann dieser Satz nicht gelten.
English translation: The proverb says, to be sure, that trying beats studying, but for statecraft this maxim cannot hold.
The opening opposes political experimentation, exemplified by the Badeni ministry, to systematic knowledge of the monarchy’s social forces. Statecraft must understand the conditions on which successful action depends. Population is one such condition, but Wieser supplements demographic accounting with an assessment of productive capacities.
Der Besitz, den ein Volk errungen hat, ist eine Macht, die im Staatsleben respektiert werden muß, noch höhere Wirkung aber kommt auf die Dauer den Kräften zu, die den Besitz hervorbringen.
English translation: The property that a people has won is a power which must be respected in the life of the state; in the long run, however, a still higher effect belongs to the forces that bring that property forth.
The distinction between accumulated wealth and the forces producing it organizes his interpretation of economic statistics. Yet Wieser does not simply equate prosperity with political power: German communities in Hungary and Hungarian political ascendancy demonstrate that the two can diverge. His argument for Bohemian Germans therefore combines economic performance with territorial concentration, national consciousness, and connections to wider German culture.
The empirical core draws on district assessments for the new personal income tax in 1899. Wieser groups German, Czech, and mixed territories, subdividing them into larger towns and administrative districts. He compares taxpayer numbers, income thresholds, income sources, taxable totals, and tax liabilities. These measure taxable strata rather than comprehensive national incomes: the much larger population earning no more than 600 florins remains outside the evidence. Nevertheless, he extrapolates the observed German advantage to lower incomes and treats the measured population as especially significant politically.
National attribution also requires assumptions. Predominantly monolingual districts are assigned to their majority nationality, even though this counts wealthy Germans in Czech districts on the Czech side. Mixed towns, especially Prague, require private estimates because official national breakdowns are unavailable. His conclusions thus depend on administrative evidence and judgments about the national composition and wider significance of taxable wealth.
Wieser estimates that Germans, slightly over a third of Bohemia’s population, supply nearly half its taxpayers above 600 florins, approximately half or more at higher thresholds, and 57.6 percent of personal income-tax liabilities. He interprets this distribution as evidence of broadly developed bourgeois, agricultural, and skilled industrial strata, rather than merely concentrated fortunes. Czech political strength, by contrast, rests in his account on a wider electorate and an alliance with great landowners.
Die wirtschaftlichen Errungenschaften der Deutschen Böhmens zeugen um so stärker für sie, als sie alles aus eigener Kraft geleistet haben.
English translation: The economic achievements of the Germans of Bohemia testify all the more strongly in their favour in that they have accomplished everything by their own strength.
This assertion exposes the evaluative framework surrounding the figures. Wieser presents German economic success as independently earned achievement and converts its fiscal expression into cultural authority. Comparisons by income source locate the strongest German advantage in independent enterprise and occupations, which he reads as evidence of initiative. Urbanization and industrial development explain much of the difference; comparisons between similarly sized towns and predominantly agricultural districts seek to establish that it persists beyond the urban–rural divide. Economic inequality becomes an argument against treating Germans politically as a merely numerical minority.
Prague complicates any straightforward equation between German wealth and political predominance. Its concentration of taxpayers and income counterbalances the German towns, while its development as a Czech intellectual centre retains talent, organizes opinion, and integrates migrants into national metropolitan life. Wieser treats the capital as an institution producing collective power, not simply as accumulated wealth. Defending its remaining German bourgeois population consequently becomes his principal strategic recommendation.
The concluding Austrian comparison broadens the argument: Germans occupy a dominant position in the taxable economy, while Germans and Czechs together would command an overwhelming share. Their hypothetical cooperation points toward common economic interests across national antagonism. The article’s central tension remains the passage from limited fiscal measurements to expansive judgments about national capacity and political entitlement.
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