Page:The Bohemian Review, vol2, 1918.djvu/12

 find it to his advantage to permit Emperor Charles to make a peace that would leave the Dual Empire practically unimpaired. Dr. Barry’s argument on this point is very striking and convincing and should be carefully read and pondered by the statesmen of America and England both. He says:

“But some among us are pleading that we should ‘detach’ the Dual Empire from Kaiserdom by offering it a separate peace. Do these well-intentioned persons, mostly of the class in which diplomatists are bred, consider what their proposals would bring about the moment that such a treaty was signed? War having languished into a long truce or its equivalent on the Russian front, it would cease altogether on the Roumanian, Serbian and Italian. Austria would send to the West all those German officers and divisions now employed in stiffening her own unsteady troops. As they retired, parks of Austrian artileryartillery [sic] with ammunition corresponding would follow. Thanks to our touching memories of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ we should have liberated the Kaiser from a grave anxiety, increased his armies and doubled the risk to our own. That is not all, probably not the worst. We should have put in commission for the German benefit some fifty million of workers who would transform Austria making it the granary and the armory of the Fatherland—fields, mines, manufactures, transport service. And how could the Western Allies forbid that which they were unable to prevent? We have looked on helplessly while neutral Holland was feeding and arming the Teuton hosts, all in the way of trade. Imagine the relief to beleagured Germany that a neutral Austria would afford. So timely, and soon so abundant, would it prove that we may perhaps be startled, ere many months are gone, by hearing from good sources of the Wilhemstrasse urging a ‘separate peace’ on its friends of the Ballplatz, just as under different circumstances it prescribed and insisted on the ultimatum to Serbia. No, ‘detachment’ is not the word for us when we are dealing with Mr. Facing-Both-Ways, treacherous at once and insidious, who would affect to be England’s reconciled comrade while he was Prussia’s tool. We cannot, I hope, have reached that degree of infatuation at which we would guarantee the vast resources of Austria-Hungary to von Hinderburg’s use under the deluding name of ‘neutrality’. We do not want any more neutrals.”

Cannon Barry does not look with favor upon schemes of federalized Austria. The royal word of the Hapsburgs does not seem to him to be much of a guarantee; he prefers to trust the small nations that are to arise out of the ruins of the Hapsburg empire, their love of liberty, their fear of German aggression. “Quite conceivably the Emperor Karl would consent to be crowned in Prague with the crown of Saint Venceslas, and in Agram as king of the Croats and Slovenes; he would give them their several parliaments with ministers responsible to the majority. But that is all stage-play. When the curtain fell and the business of government was taken in hand, does any politician or diplomatist believe that such crowned Federalism would be aught else than organized hypocrisy? Let us clear our minds of cant, even when we hear it snuffling in pious tones its reminiscences of chivalrous Austrians and constitutional Magyars. We are fighting for our lives, nay, for the liberties and happiness of generations yet to be, for the British Empire and the true culture which we have inherited from classic antiquity, for the Christian Church of old, and emphatically, for the civilized West, which now embraces America. What lot or portion have the Hohenzollerns and their subject Hapsburgs in defending this our human estate? None; they are bent on laying it waste. Break them, I say, and bind them close by setting free, by making strong the peoples round about, on whose toil and serfdom they have thriven. Parchment is only sheepskin; but a valiant little nation, give it power to manage itself, will show what the spirit can do, be the odds ever so tremendous—and here let us recite, honoris causa, the names of Belgium, Serbia, Montenegro, Roumania. There are nations besides them, waiting till the day of deliverance dawns, in the front rank Bohemia and Poland. But the pioneer, from a past of well-nigh twenty-seven centuries, the mother of Latin and medieval civilization, is Italy. Have we made up our minds that we will save Austria, enslave Poland, leave Bohemia to be tortured without hope, and refuse to see in Italy her predestined mission as vanguard and herald of the Western Allies? For we too must choose, and our choice falls within a narrow field. From the Baltic to the Adriatic, there stretches a belt of captive and very unhappy nations or tribes whom we can release, make our devoted friends and bring into the West, far off as they seem to dwell.