Page:Emile Vandervelde - Three Aspects of the Russian Revolution - tr. Jean Elmslie Henderson Findlay (1918).djvu/273

 bear, to that which bound once for all every province to a State, or rather placed it in the domain of a sovereign. Any change made was considered as infringing the divine right on which the sovereignty was founded, but to-day, when the Constitution is based on the naturally variable will of the people, the right of populations to change their rulers seems no less essential than their right, to retain them. It would be as tyrannical to maintain against their will in the Hungarian or Austrian State, Bosnia or Bohemia or Transylvania, which aspired to other national destinies, as it would be to attach by force to the German Empire Belgium, which has an invincible repugnance to abandon her independent existence.

The right of nations to dispose of themselves implied no less surely that they shall have no masters in their own countries either. It was only a misleading verbalism, for example, when one spoke of the right of Russia to dispose of herself before the Revolution, since the Czar could dispose of the Empire. In the same way we cannot honestly say that Germany