Page:The Czechoslovak Review, vol3, 1919.djvu/111



It has been announced that the final report of the commission on Czechoslovak claims has been submitted for the approval of the peace conference. What the report recommends is not known, but the opinion prevails that the claims put forward by the Czechoslovak delegates have been in the main granted. It is a matter of utmost importance for the consolidation of the Czechoslovak Republic that its definite frontiers be established as soon as possible, for until then the government of Prague is unable to settle some of its most urgent problems.

Difficulties with neighbors still continue. Of least importance practically, and yet the source of much irritation, is the dispute between the Czechs and Poles about the district of Teschen. In the middle of February an Allied commission visited the disputed territory and conducted investigations as to the justice of the conflicting claims. Not only the Czech inhabitants of Teschen, but Germans and Jews also asked for the inclusion of this small principality in the Czechoslovak Republic. Members of the commission were surprised, when the mayor of the city of Teschen declared himself in favor of connection with the Czechoslovaks. Still more unexpected was a similar request of Polish Protestants; while practically all the Poles in Galicia, the Congress Poland and Posnania are Catholics, there are strong Polish Protestant settlements in Austrian Silesia and Western Prussia. Polish Protestants of Western Prussia declared their preference for union with Catholic Poland rather than remain subject to Protestant Prussia, but the Polish Protestants of Teschen chose to throw in their lot with the Czechoslovak Republic. Since the occupation of the coal area by Czechoslovak troops the production of coal has been almost doubled. It is stated on apparently good authority that the decision of the peace conference commission provides for the annexation of a small section at the eastern end of the district of Teschen to Poland, but the bulk of the territory is to be included in Czechoslovakia, with all the coal mines, as well as the entire railroad running through the center of the district and connecting the Bohemian part of the Republic with Slovakia.

Far more serious are the difficulties with the Germans. The government of German Austria—or simply Austria, as one ought to call it now, since there is no other Austria any more—still assumes that the biased Austrian census of 1910 should be accepted as valid and that nearly a third of the territory of the Bohemian lands should go to Austria, and that means to Germany. As a matter of fact three and a half million Germans found in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia by the census of 1910 have been reduced to something like two million on the basis of local enumeration of population undertaken by various municipalities. In cities like Brno, the capital of Moravia, and dozens of other cities and villages the German majority has been transformed into a minority of one-third and less. Anticipating that the decision of the peace conference would go against German claims, the socialist rulers of Austria in close understanding with the Ebert government made preparations for an uprising in German districts on the northern and western frontiers of Bohemia. It was planned that upon the out break of disorders soldiers from Germany would enter the Czechoslovak Republic and occupy all the disputed territory. This conspiracy became known to the Czechoslovak authorities who have a very efficient intelligence service. The German consular representative in Prague was arrested, plans for the rebellion were captured and the whole conspiracy nipped in the bud. Germans in Bohemia have no just complaint of their treatment by Czechoslovak authorities. The only exceptional steps taken against the separatists movement consisted in censoring German newspapers