Page:The Czechoslovak Review, vol3, 1919.djvu/302

 is a well-founded Czechoslovak claim against the Magyars for restitution. When Karolyi had to evacuate Slovakia last winter, he swept it bare of machinery, cattle and above all of railway rolling stock; and in May Bela Kuhn in his invasion of southern half of Slovakia repeated the operation. Now the Roumanians took from the Magyars not only what was really Magyar property, but also what had been stolen from the Slovaks. The Czechoslovak government had relied on the peace conference to settle its clams against the Magyar Republic; the Roumanians spurned the peace conference and helped themselves. It must be confessed that the authority of the statesmen gathered in Paris has sustained a great diminution as a result of the Roumanian adventure.

This will have an effect on the solution of the Teschen dispute between the Czechs and the Poles. Conferences were held in Cracow early in August between commissions of the two nations, but they led to no result. The Poles insisted on plebiscite; the Czechs opposed it. They took their stand on historical grounds; Teschen has been connected with Bohemia for the last six hundred years. Poles claim eastern Galicia on historical grounds, although the majority of the population there is overwhelmingly Ruthenian, but in case of Teschen they ignore Bohemian historical rights and appeal to right of self-determination. The Czechs felt compelled to oppose popular voting in Teschen for this reason also, that the Poles are in wrongful occupation of the majority of the district and have been intimidating the population to make them vote in favor of Polish rule. Since the Czech-Polish conference could not reach an agreement, it is now up to the peace conference to decide the dispute. A few months ago a decision of the Allies, even if unfavorable, would have been accepted as final; now the prestige of the peace conference has suffered a serious blow.

In internal politics the new coalition government of the socialist block and the farmers’ party seems firmly in the saddle. The democrats and the people’s party are in opposition and their criticism is sometimes very inconvenient to the ministry which cannot perform miracles and cure the country of its pains. But the coalition holds and will probably continue in power, until the new elections. It is planned to hold the elections in December on the basis of a new electoral law which is described elsewhere. But the program of the government calls for the adoption of the constitution by the present National Assembly, mainly for the reason that Germans and Magyars who will be represented in the first popularly elected legislature are not trusted to cooperate in the enactment of the fundamental laws of the Republic. There is no intention of oppressing these racial minorities, and the electoral law is framed so as to give them the full representation to which they are entitled. But the constitution will provide for a unitary state with wide local self-government, and not a sort of a dual monarchy, as the Germans would want—a separate German state alongside of the Czechoslovak state in one republic. The Czechoslovaks are willing to concede to the Germans—and to Magyar minorities as well—all rights of citizens, rights to schools, to their own cultural life; but the character of the republic, and especially in its external relations, will be neither German nor neutral. It will be distinctly Czechoslovak.

The National Assembly, after it had turned over to the committee the governmental franchise bill, adjourned for a vacation on July 24. It will meet again early in September. Before adjournment it granted the government authority to borrow 60 million lire in Italy to defray cost of transportation of American food and to buy cotton yarn from Italian mills. Economic questions are still very difficult to solve. The country needs credit to buy raw materials for its factories; without credit foreign commerce is seriously hampered. There is an official foreign exchange bureau in Prague to whom every one is obliged to turn over credits in foreign currencies; this bureau in turn assigns foreign currency to such importers, as can satisfy the ministry of commerce of the necessity of their proposed importation for domestic industry. But there is not enough foreign currency available to provide for the great needs of the country, and French and British and American exporters will not accept payment in Czechoslovak crowns. Some business has been done with Swiss merchants who accepted crowns in pay ment and sold them in America below cost,