Page:The New Europe (The Slav standpoint), 1918.pdf/81

 and French Colonies will continue to be English and French; nations under European rule will be secured, in accordance with their cultural development and their number, national autonomy and participation in the government.

(26) Africa will remain substantially under the rule of England and France; Germany may receive back its western colony, Italy will agree with England and France as to the increase of the colonial domain.

(27) America (Northern, Central and Southern) will not permit Germany to establish autonomous German colonies.

(28) With regard to colonies, their administration must have regard for the needs of the native peoples and educate them and extend to them self-government gradually.

(29) The German colonies in Polynesia will be given to England and Holland.

(30) The Jews among all nations will enjoy the same right as other citizens; their national and Zionistic aims will receive after the example of England all possible support.

(31) The Congress will adopt a law with international guarantees securing to national minorities cultural and administrative self-government.

(32) Ethnographic rectifications of state boundaries may, with the consent of the nations concerned, be carried out from time to time according to the growth of national consciousness and experience. The Congress must urge an exact census of the population according to nationality, for the existing official statistics are very partial and insufficient.

(33) The Congress should provide leading principles for eugenic supervision, secured from the point of view of hygiene, of the growth of the population in all the states; policy in regard to population will be of great importance after the war in all the countries. Alcoholism, for instance, must be suppressed internationally.

(34) To secure the execution of the principles and decisions reached by the Congress of Peace, the Congress will transform itself into an international tribunal, controlling the cultural development of nations and the organisation of international reciprocity. (League of Nations).

The leading principle of all decisions must be the endeavour to facilitate the international organisation of all nations of Europe, and to bring them nearer to the nations of Asia, Africa, and America. If necessary, some closer unions of nations can be formed.

The political innovations proposed in this theme are neither many nor surprising. They are in harmony with the development of nations and their just demand of political freedom and unification. De facto only two independent states would be new, the Polish and Czecho-Slovak; Bohemia and Poland are not new states, for they had once been free, their freedom will be merely restored. Bohemia is legally independent, Austria and Hungary oppressed by force. The: other states will remain, some enlarged, some diminished, or their independence will be strengthened (Finland—Hungary). Of course, Austria-Hungary will be radically changed, and so will Russia and partly Prussia. It is just the transformation of Eastern Europe which furnishes the strongest proof that the world war will end far differently than Pangermanism expected.

But the New Man, homo Europæus, will be the result not merely of external politics, but principally of internal. All nations will be obliged, after the war, to devote all their thought to material and spiritual rebirth. Mutual slaughter is not a great action, the belligerent nations will realize the greatness of this moment, they will create a new historical epoch if they rightly appreciate the horrors of this war, if they overcome the war fever and orientate themselves as to where and how further development should proceed, and if they decide for permanent peace and for humanity. Democracy must become the faith of all, a world view. In Prussia the Germans organised a forcible germanization of the Poles, and a philosopher was found (Ed. v. Hartmann) who declared in the name of the Prussian ideal the necessity to exterminate the Poles (“austrotten”); in Hungary the Magyar oligarchy maintained itself by 2em