OBITUARY

Evening Star, Issue 21171, 3 August 1932, Page 7

OBITUARY

DR SEIPEL Press Association —By Telegraph—Copyright, VIENNA, August 2, (Received August 3, at 9 a.m.) The death is announced of Dr Seipel* a former Chancellor of Austria. A priest who became a Chancellors Such was the career of Monsignor Ignatz Seipel. He became Austrian Chancellor on May 31, 1922. Born of poor parents in 1876, he was brought up by his stepmother, who educated him for the Church, which he entered at an early age. At first he devoted himself entirely to his religious duties, but even as a young man he displayed considerable political capacity, and soon rose to be an important figure in the Christian Social Party, which even before the war advocated sweeping inter-* nal reforms in the Austrian Empire* By the end of the war he was the acknowledged leader of this party, and accepted the porfolio of Social Welfare in the last desperate Cabinet of the illfated Emperor Charles in October* 1918. Three and a-half years later his party found itself in office, and he, as its leader, found himself at the head of the State. At that time the condition of Austria was desperate. Vienna, formerly the capital of a great Empirewas ndw an isolated city, surrounded by a mere fragment of the former Austrian possessions. No real attempt had been made to adapt the resources of the country to the new European situation, and it was faced by bankruptcy, and starvation. To others things seemed hopeless, but Mgr Seipel, the leader of a party whose watchword was reconstruction on the basis of the existing order, set himself to the task of saving his country. Disappointed in his attempts to secure the active supEort of the Entente, ho adopted the old course of visiting the neighbours who appeared to have most to gain from tne collapse of Austria, and succeeded in convincing them that the disappearance of a single unit of the New; Europe would lead to the destruction of the whole system. At the same time he introduced a drastic system of internal reform, of which the keynote was the most rigid economy in the public services. Dr Seipel was Chancellor for six years, although not continuously. In June, .1924, he was wounded by a Communist. He forgave his assailant and brought about his release two years later.