Page:The Bohemian Review, vol2, 1918.djvu/96

 prior to the meeting of the emperors, Austrian policy has been governed absolutely by German wishes. The decision was taken that the Slav rebellion must be put down by force. The new foreign minister, Baron Burian, is a member of the Magyar oligarchy; he has no sympathy with the half hearted way in which the Austrian Germans keep down their Slavs. With his coming to the Ball-Platz some of the Magyar thoroughness was injected into the Austrian police administration. Premier Seydler, importuned by the Germans of Austria and having his backbone strengthened by influences proceeding from the foreign ministry and from Berlin, granted one of the German demands which the Czechs had been fighting furiously and successfully for three decades. By a ministerial decree the old Kingdom of Bohemia, a historical as well as a geographical unit, was split up into districts. The population of Bohemia is two-thirds Czech and one-third German. The German scheme of splitting the country into districts means that in a district with a German majority the Czech language will no longer have any rights, Czech schools will be closed and the Czech minority will be more easily Germanized; but in the districts where the Czechs are in the majority or where they form the whole of the population, the Germans will still have all the rights of the Czechs in addition to the privileges of the race that has a decisive influence in the affairs of the state and whose language is the language of the state administration.

It is noteworthy and illustrative of the lawless condition of Austria that this important measure, for more than a generation hotly contested in parliament, has been put into effect by a simple ministerial decree. Of course that is strictly illegal, even with the help of the famous paragraph 14 of the Austrian constitution, and it makes it certain that the Vienna parliament which is to meet in the middle of the present month will have to be sent home and a regime of absolutism, no longer masquerading under parliamentary forms, will be inaugurated in Austria. The Czechs are sure to have the support of the Jugoslav, Polish, Italian and Roumanian deputies in their attack upon the govermentgovernment [sic], and with the majority of the people's representatives against him Seydler will be compelled to govern without the Reichsrat.

For the effect of all this on the Bohemian population we have to rely so far on on brief cable reports. But they announce enough to make it clear that the Czechs have gone on from declarations to deeds. There is, of course, no regularly organized arrmedarmed [sic] rebellion. The Czech leaders are determined, but cool-headed men who do not want to lead their people into a massacre. As long as the Germans reap considerable successes in the West, as long as the Austro-German armies can spare a couple of Landsturm divisions with machine guns and poison gas shells, an uprising of unarmed elderly men would be the act of madmen. But short of that everything is done to manifest the Czech solidarity with the Allies and to hamper the prosecution of war by Austria. We hear that in the Prague suburb of Smichov, a city of some 80,000 people, 150 women were arrested for smashing windows and making a demonstration against the government. But that possibly might have been due to hunger. The events in Prague were of a more political character. In the middle of May a celebration was held in Prague in commeration of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the National Theatre of the Kingdom of Bohemia. The Jugoslavs again came to Prague to prove their union with the brother Slavs, and we are told that there were delegations in Prague of Roumanians, Austrian Russians, Poles and Italians. Detailed reports are still lacking of the scenes of emotion that must have taken place in that beautiful building upon the banks of the Vltava, as Smetana’s great opera “Libuše” was sung foretelling the greatness of free Bohemia and as speeches were made denouncing the Austrian tyranny. The cable dispatches tell that several deputies addressed the gathering urging resistance to the end and the sacrifice of wealth and blood for Bohemia. Crowds parading through the streets wore national colors of the entente states and cheered Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George, and above all their own leader Masaryk who from the Austrian point of view is a condemned traitor.

The government took severe measures. Crowds were dispersed by calling out the Magyar garrison; martial law was proclaimed throughout Bohemia which means that even slight infractions of the law are punishable by death in a summary trial.