Page:The Bohemian Review, vol1, 1917.djvu/120

 law; Bohemians and Poles and Slovenians and Ruthenians have the same rights in the empire as the Germans, according to the nineteenth article of the fundamental laws. What people everywhere know to be the fact is that in Austria Germans rule and the other races obey; yes, that the Slavs and Latins are sent to the battlefields to die in order that the lordly German race might conquer the world.

Francis Joseph did not keep his word to the Czechs, the Croatians, the Slovaks. His great nephew Charles gives promise of following in the footsteps of his predecessor. He has already given to the world one proof of the faith of the Hapsburgs, his attitude toward the Russian program of no annexations and no indemnities. April 14th the official correspondence bureau made this statement: “The government of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy has been informed of the declaration of the provisional Russian government, published April 11th. It has ascertained from it that Russia does not intend to conquer other nations, to take away from them their national heritage, to occupy by force foreign territory; that on the contrary it desires to bring about permanent peace on the basis of the rights of nations to determine for themselves their allegiance. The Austro-Hungarian government learned from this that the aims of the Russian provisional government are analogous to the aim which the imperial and royal minister of foreign affairs declared in his interview of March 31st to be the war aim of the monarchy”. Compare with this pronouncement the statement of Premier Seidler in the Vienna parliament, June 27th: “After conference with the minister for foreign affairs I have the honor to inform the house that the supposition contained in deputy Daszynski’s interpellation, to the effect that the imperial and royal government has recognized the right of nations to self-determination to be the basis of permanent peace is false. The imperial and royal government takes its stand on article five of the fundamental laws of December 21, 1867, giving the exclusive right to conclude peace to His Majesty. By that the defense of the interests and the aims of the nations of Austria at that decisive time is entrusted solely to the emperor. With this special reservation of the prerogatives of the crown the imperial and royal government is ready, in union with its allies, to take up negotiations with the enemy for an honorable peace. But it emphatically rejects any other basis for peace conference.”

Is there any wonder that the subjects of the Hapsburgs will not trust the royal word? When German deputy Redlich moved to go into secret session to take up the question of changes in the constitution made necessary by the war, deputy Stránský answered for the Bohemians that the Reichsrat was not the forum to determine that; the peace conference alone would settle the fate of Austria.

Amateur statesmen who have never lived in Austria imagine that federalization of this empire and its rapprochement to the Catholic states of South Germany would be the best counterpoise to the evil Prussian influence over the German empire. What a misconception of the realities. Austria is the vanguard of Germany toward the southeast. The Hapsburgs and their German subjects have ever looked upon themselves as the instrument for the Germanization of the inferior races bordering on the territory of the German people. They have not accomplished much, because the German element formed less than one-third of the population of Austria. But when Galicia is subtracted from the sum total of the Austrian provinces, as it will upon the restoration of Poland, Germans will have nearly half of the people and far more than a half of the deputies in what remains of the Austrian half of the empire. In such a case more than ever the issue in Austria would be the struggle of Czechs and Jugoslavs again Germanization, and the German dynasty with the German subjects would look for support to the German empire. Let it also be stated that no constitutional life would be possible in Austria, after Galicia became a part of the Polish state. The Czech deputies declared solemnly that they would never enter a parliament in which deputies from Galicia would not sit in their full number, for then the Bohemians would be altogether at the mercy of the Germans. Finally, there is one obstacle over which all attempts to reconstruct the Hapsburg empire on a just basis will surely be wrecked, and that is the Slovak question. There are nearly three million of them in northwestern Hungary. They are one branch of the race of which the Czechs and Bohemians are the more numerous part, and their territories form a geographical unit, divided artificially by the frontier of