Page:Bohemia – The Submerged Front.pdf/1



in 1908 Austria-Hungary made a scrap of paper out of the Treaty of Berlin and annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina against the protest of its inhabitants the great initial wrong was perpetrated. It is by studying the brutal situation thus created that we uncover the immediate sources of the great conflict and, what is more helpful, we acquire light as to possible settlements and certainly some guidance as to those which are clearly impossible. No settlement is to be thought of unless it removes all the causes and even the possible pretexts of a renewal of the struggle, at least all which are now visible. We must not only build up and energize the solemn agreements which covered the neutrality of Belgium, we must not only right the wrongs of the Poles and of the Irish, and the never-to-be-minimized wrongs of the Alsatians, but we must do justice to the Bohemians, who have fought and died for their rights without ceasing and without unseemly parley or compromise ever since the day now nearly three hundred years ago, when they were cheated out of them.

How serious is the danger and how near to the main question comes this lightly regarded side issue involving the future of Bohemia, is clearly demonstrated today by the fact that the only settlement of the Great War which now suggests itself as at all possible in Berlin and Vienna (and here at least not very enthusiastically) is the contriving of a Middle European Confederation with hegemony in Berlin, and founded upon the continued political and economic subjection of twelve million men who have fought as valiantly and whose rights and charters, long trodden underfoot, are as beyond question as are those of any of the other oppressed nationalities, with the details of whose fate, however, we of the western world are more familiar.