Page:The New Europe - Volume 3.djvu/106

 tion’’; thousands of civilians in the Bohemian countries have been sentenced to death, and all the leading Bohemian deputies have been imprisoned or exiled and sentenced to death; and the same bloody persecution is known to have been carried out in the Southern Slav and Italian countries, even as in the Roumanian districts. These are known facts, whose political significance can escape none but the wilfully blind.

It is well known that the Austrian Parliament has not been summoned since March, 1914, that war was decided and declared without its consent; only the chauvinistic and oligarchical Hungarian Parliament accepted and ratified the Emperor’s autocratic declaration of war. The majority of the Austro-Hungarian nations were—and are—against the war; the German and Magyar minority forced the whole Empire to serve as the obedient slave of Pangermanism.

The late Emperor Francis Joseph accepted the Pangerman policy. To strengthen the German minority in the Reichsrat he promised autonomy to Galicia, and the Germans were to be further rewarded by the disintegration of Bohemia into administrative departments, and by the proclamation of German as the language of the State; the Magyars were to retain their dominion in Hungary, even if the Southern Slavs were united in a trialistic body. The fate of Croatia—nominally self-governing under the Compromise of 1868—is a clear indication of what would be the meaning of this Southern Slav formation under Magyar and German rule. Meanwhile a new Poland was created as a tool of Berlin and Vienna against Russia; and, since Poland is Catholic, an Austrian or Bavarian prince on the throne would play in the East the rôle of Ferdinand and Constantine in the South.

Francis Joseph died. The new Emperor continued the old policy, but as he has used some new methods, he is believed by ingenuous politicians to be changing the entire Austrian policy and tradition. He appointed as his ministers two Bohemian aristocrats, who are Bohemian only in name, both of them staunch Conservatives and Clericals, not national Bohemians at all. Yet there can be no doubt about it that the new Emperor was setting out to win the lost confidence of the Bohemians. The Bohemian question is life and death to Austria. Without Bohemia there is no Austrian Empire;