Page:The New Europe (The Slav standpoint), 1918.pdf/82

 shooting Slovak, Serbian and Roumanian voters and by the suppression of their schools, the literature and press; in Austria the Pangermans publicly plotted their schemes of forcibly germanising whole nations; Russian tsarism followed the German example; civilised Europe remained quiet and acquiesced in all these political atrocities, until this war revealed the danger, under which the nations of Eastern Europe were languishing for years and years

The political task of the democratic reconstruction of Europe must be attained and actually made possible by a moral re-education of the nations—either democracy or dynastic militarism, either Bismarckism or rational and honest politics, either force or humanity, either matter or spirit!

Prussian and Austrian politicians, the German and Austrian Emperors louder than others, emphasize the religious foundation of their policy and their states; but this religion is political religion. Prussia and Austria are survivals of the theocratic, mediæval imperialism; democracy is the antithesis of theocracy.

Religion will not lose thereby the weight of the authority, on the contrary it will gain, if it is freed from the state and the arbitrary will of deified dynasties. What was right in the mediæval theocracy—the idea of catholicity, universality, mankind as an organised whole—will not to be lost by democracy. Democracy also hopes and works to the end that there may be one sheepfold and one shepherd.

Cæsar or Jesus—that is the watchword of democratic Europe, not Berlin–Bagdad, if Cæsar is conceived as Mommsen constructed him, seeing in him the ideal of Pangerman imperialism.