Page:The New Europe - Volume 3.djvu/107

 so Counts Martinic and Czernin toil and travail to reconcile Bohemia to the Habsburgs. But the Bohemian nation has expressed its feelings and convictions since the outbreak of the war clearly enough to show the futility of the Martinic-Czernin negotiations as long as the political leaders of the Czechs remained in exile or in prison. Meanwhile the new Emperor pursues the old Emperor’s path of unredeemable promises. Francis Joseph gave pledges to the Germans against the Bohemians; the new Emperor gives promises to both. Galicia’s autonomy and the proclamation of German as the State language are postponed, and Bohemia is tempted with a promise of autonomy, but what kind of autonomy we are not told. Peculiar news from Vienna suggests that the Emperor and his two ministers have succeeded in framing a compromise between the Bohemians and the Germans; but what compromise can it be if the Bohemians are deprived of their political leaders? Who negotiated on behalf of the Bohemian nation?

The Emperor, it is said, wishes to summon the Parliament; and we read that the Emperor himself points to the Russian Revolution as proof of the necessity of such a step. The Bohemian situation was dangerous enough in itself; but now comes the new Russian peril. A free and democratic Russia is the gravest possible threat to Austrian and German absolutism; the Slavs of Austria-Hungary, like the Italians and Roumanians, never loved Russian absolutism; but they could not successfully fight Austrian absolutism so long as the greatest Slav country itself was absolutist. Tsarism was for the Slavs the heel of Achilles; free Russia is the end of Austrian absolutism, and that means the death of Habsburg Austria. The Emperor Charles sees this and tries, therefore, by convoking Parliament, to give his régime a new democratic air. But no one is deceived. A Parliament sitting under the military pressure of Vienna has no democratic significance; more than half the political representatives of the Czechs and Jugoslavs are in prison or exile, and a Reichsrat without them is merely a packed jury. The whole is only a bluff for Neutrals and the Allies, or, perhaps, more truly, for that part of the political public in Europe that is willing to accept words for realities.

The Germans and the Magyars now begin to realise the results of their Pangerman policy in raising vast racial