Page:The Bohemian question by Charles Pergler (1917).pdf/6

 (South-Slav) state, and Poland will be independent or autonomous. If Austria then remains in existence, the only nations left within it will be the Germans, the Magyars and the Czecho-Slovaks.

In this “small Austria” the Czechs and Slovaks would constitute a minority; the Germans and Magyars would again combine to dominate and oppress the Czecho-Slovaks. Austria even so mutilated would continue to be a source of strength to Germany, and would form a basis for another attempt to realize pan-German plans of middle Europe and the consequent conquest of the world. The internal conditions of such a state would necessarily be volcanic, and Austria would continue to be a menace to European peace. We should thus be confronted with a situation which President Wilson in his address to the Senate described as the ferment of spirit of whole populations fighting subtly and constantly for an opportunity to freely develop. To again paraphrase another of the President’s statements, the world could not be at peace because its life would not be stable, because the will would be in rebellion, because there would not be tranquillity of spirit, because there would not be a sense of justice, of freedom and of right.

The Austrian question is the Turkish problem in another form. Austria can be no more federalized than European Turkey. To permit Austria to exist in any form when this war is concluded, is merely to delay the solution of a problem that will never down; and in the life of nations, as well as individuals, delay and procrastination, the tendency to postpone a final decision, are crimes for which penalties are sure to follow. We have seen what this penalty is: a war devastating civilized countries.

The suggestions made in certain quarters that a federal constitution in Austria be one of the conditions of peace shows the futility of the hopes to federalize Austria. Those knowing Austro-Hungarian conditions need not be convinced that the empire’s ruling classes would never carry out such conditions in spirit, and perhaps not even in letter; the world would not go to war immediately to force Austria to comply with such a condition of peace, and thus the germs of a future war, brought about by our failure to see clearly now, would be permitted to exist.

A liberal Russia will be what Russia always claimed to have been: a protector of the small Slav nationalities. With Russia liberalized, the spirit of nationalism, which must not be confounded with chauvinism, will be intensified, and Russia will never again