Page:The New Europe - Volume 3.djvu/279

 When the new linguistic conception of nationality came to assert itself against that of privileged citizenship, the Poles and Magyars found themselves again in a very similar position. Their gentries covered an infinitely wider area than that inhabited by the populations speaking their own tongues. The rise of democracy undermined Polish and Magyar imperialism. But the Poles and the Magyars do not intend to give in without a struggle; landed gentry do not commit harakiri for the benefit of their peasantry. The nationality of East Galicia is Little Russian, but the Polish nobility, which owns practically all the big landed estates in the country, has no intention of conceding its government to the Little Russians, just as the Magyar nobles and their new bourgeois associates refuse to submit to democratic Slav and Ruman majorities in the non-Magyar parts of Hungary.

The case of the Czechs and Jugoslavs in Austria was the very opposite to that of the Poles; their upper classes had very largely succumbed to the process of Germanisation, and, as in Ireland, democracy was their national interest. There could be but little sympathy between the Polish magnates and the Czech and Jugoslav peasant-democrats. The rising Slav nations of Western Austria and Hungary reminded the Polish nobility of Galicia too much of the Little Russian peasants. Even if they reminded them of their own Polish peasants of Western Galicia, the impression was hardly more reassuring. The Polish landowning gentry has lived in continual terror of its peasants, and this has given to the Austrian Government a peculiar hold over the representatives of the Polish nobility in Parliament. The Czechs and Jugoslavs had hardly any reason to fear the wrath of Vienna. The bodies and souls of the nation were, and are, their only status posssidendi, and these, at least in peace time, are inviolable. But the Polish upper classes of Galicia lived in a glass house, and could not throw stones at the Austrian Government, or else their privileges, economic and national, might have been broken. In return for the protection of these privileges they have served Vienna as the prætorians of the Habsburg dynasty. These Musterknaben were favourites of the dynasty, which always prefers aristocratic landowners to educated peasants.

To sum up: whilst, before the war, the Czecho-Slovaks, who are all included within the Habsburg Monarchy, were