Page:The Czechoslovak Review, vol3, 1919.djvu/14

 placed on them by their superiors, the younger clergy will henceforth be free to choose their racial allegiance. Already there is talk in Bohemia of the revival, in some modernized form, of the Bohemian Brethren’s Church with its traditions dear to the Czechoslovaks. Around this church, it is possible, will rally dissidents of all denominations and of all shades of opinion.

A Prague newspaper relates how, after the Czechoslovak Republic had been proclaimed, a Bohemian-German asked a jubilant Czech fellow-countryman:

“Now, that you Czechs have a state of your own, how are you going to treat us Germans?” To this the Czech replied: “We will treat you the same way you have treated us.” The story goes that the German, upon hearing this reply, looked worried.

The Czech in this story was not voicing the sentiment of his nation, when he stated that the Germans would be treated as well, or rather as unjustly as the Germans under the old order of things had treated them. “We will be fairer with the Germans than they were with us”, said Dr. Kramář, the Premier, in a recent newspaper interview. “We will give them (Germans) every liberty, their own schools and language, but the government must be ours.” So much for the treatment of the Germans.

Two objects are certain of being attained as a result of the cutting up of large estates. In the first place the land hunger of the small farmer will be appeased; secondly, a crushing blow will be dealt thereby to Germanism and feudalism. The chateaux of the large landed aristocracy, everyone knows, were nests of illiberalism and militant Teutonism. None will feel sorry, when both are finally put out of harm’s way.

What of the Germans in the so-called German section of Bohemia ? Will they not want to secede? Will they not want to set up a state of their own? These two questions might be answered by asking a third one: is there such a thing in Bohemia or Moravia, or Silesia, as purely German territory? A glance at an ethnographic map will show there is no territory worth speaking of where there are not strong Czech minorities, except in one corner of the country known as the Egerland. According to the census of 1910 there lived in Bohemia 6,774,309 people, including Soldiers in active service. Of this number (1900) 62.68% were Czechs, 37.26% Germans. However, it should be borne in mind that these figures are the product of a doctored, make-believe census. The Austrian Government saw fit to count, for reasons best known to itself, not according to the mother tongue, but on the basis of the “language of association”. When the German employer in the northwest is no longer encouraged by Vienna to intimidate his Czech help with threats of discharge unless he puts himself down as an Austrian, the number of Czechs, it is confidently expected, will promptly increase by several hundred thousand in Bohemia alone, while the ranks of the Germans will diminish in proportion.

Moreover, should the Bohemian-Germans be allowed to rend in twain the ancient Bohemian Kingdom, where would the security, the protection against invasion, be on the part of the Czechoslovak Republic? Look at the diamond shaped range of mountains forming a natural barrier on three sides and walling in the country. Then judge for yourself whether the Czechoslovak people could long maintain themselves against a neighbor lusting for conquest, if deprived of the natural protection which these mountains offer? Surely, when the Allies accepted President Wilson’s doctrine of self-determination of peoples and when the Czechoslovaks, agreeably to that doctrine, established their commonwealth on the ruins of Austria, it was intended that this and other states should endure, and that they should be provided with safeguards to maintain themselves—not that these safeguards should be destroyed.

On the train from Vienna to Ljubljana I had a long talk with a wealthy Vienna merchant. He took me for a Pole. We said a good deal about the unhappy financial situation in the land. He surprised me by declaring that the one salvation for Central Europe are the Czechs. “A few months ago we transferred our business to the Zivnostenska Banka. They went through our books, and in three days all was in order. The very next week I went in to see them to get a very large sum of money in cash. With my former bankers it would have taken perhaps two days, but these people asked me to sit down for a little, and in a quarter of an hour I was walking out with the money. It fairly took my breath away.

W. J. Rose, in the New Europe.

Col. Roosevelt, speaking of the victories of the Czechoslovaks in Siberia, said: “The extraordinary nature of their great and heroic feat is literally unparalleled, as far as I know, in ancient or modern warfare.”