Page:The New Europe - Volume 3.djvu/372

 merely for them, but for all Germans of all countries and all parties, finally obsolete. Every attempt to revive Bohemian constitutional law, which above all conflicts with the rights of the Germans in Bohemia to national self-government, will meet with the sharpest possible resistance from all Germans. Further the constitutional aims openly revealed in the declarations of the Southern Slav deputies will meet with determined opposition from all Germans in Austria. That this question should have been raised at such a moment as the present, when the need of a strong unitary central State (Gesamistaat) has been demonstrated by the world-war, meets with our sharpest condemnation. The Reichsrat, which is called to work at the reconstruction of the State in the sense of unity and of solid fronts, must not have its time and energy used up by a dispute which has been proved to lead to nothing. Now more than ever all have to submit themselves to the State. We Germans do this, and will allow nothing to turn us from this duty, least of all the constitutional pronouncements which have been made to-day.”

A flood of light is shed upon the attitude of the German Socialists to the problem of peace by a correspondence published in Die Hilfe (the organ of Friedrich Naumann, the Radical apostle of “Mitteleuropa”) between a Radical politician and a Social-Democrat member of the Reichstag. The former, Herr Heile, criticises the attitude of the Socialist leader Herr Scheidemann as no less deleterious to the cause of Germany than the propaganda of the Pangermans, and, while professing that his faith in the Social-Democratic party as “a German party” is by no means shaken, expresses surprise “that men like you, Heine, Südekum, Lensch, David, Hänisch and many others, do not find occasion, in view of such pronouncements on the part of your party leader, to lay all the stronger emphasis on the German standpoint.”

Herr Göhre, in his attempt to prove his correspondent’s criticisms to be groundless, gives the following delightfully frank exposition of German Socialist policy: “How do matters stand? The Central Powers are faced by a coalition of nations numbering 700,000,000 people. To conquer them is an impossibility, or if that succeeded, it could only be at the cost of the last German man. Now at any rate the two sides still absolutely balance each other. The Central Powers occupied Belgium, Roumania, Serbia and Montenegro, and parts of France and Russia, the Entente almost all Africa, Arabia and South Mesopotamia. The demand for a peace without annexations does not mean merely the restoration of the countries conquered by the Central Powers, but also of those conquered by the Entente. But for England, our fiercest and real enemy, that means the destruction of her new world-policy, ranging over whole continents. To-day