Page:The New Europe - Volume 4.djvu/67

Rh connected alike with Roumanian national aspirations and Russian Socialist objections to them, and no consideration of the building of a Greater Roumania would be complete without it.

.

political situation in Austria-Hungary is singularly critical. The monarchy is economically on the edge of the abyss; the working classes are reduced to absolute want; the lower middle class (officials, employees, etc., particularly) are starving; whilst the upper middle class, manufacturers and tradespeople, are ruined. From the intellectual point of view there is complete demoralisation: the nation is exhausted, its resistance broken; it is as incapable of moral elevation as of rebellion. Indifference and renunciation characterise it. Only the intellectual class, formerly occupied with politics, continues active—in so far as it is not threatened by imprisonment.

In this setting the Reichsrat met and presented a singular spectacle to the world. All that those acquainted with Austria had sedulously predicted for three years came to pass on the first day. The Czechs announced their programme for an independent Czecho-Slovak State, the Poles intimated their decision to separate from Austria in order to create a unified and free Poland, and the Jugoslavs expressed the desire to be united in a Jugoslav State. The solution of the Austro-Hungarian problem thus stated, signified that the Poles would definitely disappear from Austria, that the Czechs would become independent and would take with them almost a third of Hungary—the richest and the most important part—that the Jugoslavs would unite with their Balkan compatriots and the Italians with their co-nationals in Italy. The Germans in German Austria and the Magyars in Hungary alone would remain. This programme, then, signifies the definitive end of their domination. At a single stroke they would lose everything. What is especially important and absolutely decisive for the fate of the Monarchy is, that Austro-Hungarian Governments during the war have succeeded in compelling absolute silence for three years by force. Clam-Martinic committed the