Chapter VI: The Balkans 290 (6)

To sum up, Germany has definitively lost about 17,500 square miles of territory and about 2,900,000 subjects. If all the plebiscites go against her, her total losses in the east will amount to an area of about 27,500 square miles and a total population of nearly 5,800,000. In other words, she risks losing in the east an area five times as great as Alsace-Lorraine, and a population three times as great.

There is no denying that this is serious business. The Powers who have decreed and sponsored these arrangements have thereby assumed responsibilities and liabilities, the gravity of which ought not to be overlooked or minimized. There is a common belief in Germany (though a wrong one) that Prussia has never permanently lost any territory she has once held, and that after every Jena comes a Leipzig or a Waterloo. And what must be the feeling of true-blue Prussians over the loss of these ‘Eastern Marches’ on the maintenance of which, Prince von Bülow was wont to declare, “the fate of Prussia, of the empire, nay of the whole German nation depends”? The resulting dangers to the peace of Europe are obvious. But it should not be imagined that these dangers would have been avoided, or even much reduced, if the Allies had demanded less for Poland. Without a far greater change in German mentality than we have had any evidence of as yet, any territorial cessions at all in favor of the despised Poles were sure to be fiercely resented. Even Professor Delbrück, one of the most moderate of Prussian politicians, declared years ago, “All Germany would have to be hewn in pieces before we would allow even Posen to be taken away from us.” The Paris Conference was always faced by the dilemma that ‘the peace of reconciliation,’ of which the Germans talked, would have been one that left Germany intact, unpunished, and impenitent; while the peace of justice, demanded by the principles which the Allies had proclaimed, raised the vision of an embittered Germany thirsting and plotting for revenge.

At all events, one may rejoice in the fact that, in spite of the risks involved, the Peace Conference had the courage to carry through a Polish-German settlement based on principle and not upon expediency or selfish convenience, a settlement which, in Mr. Lloyd George’s phrase, “leaves Germany no just grievance,” and which does right a great wrong from which the conscience of Europe has suffered for one hundred and fifty years.

* * * * *

Turning to the territories that belonged to the late Hapsburg monarchy, we may note that Poland has had an unhappy dispute with Czecho-Slovakia over the duchy of Teschen and the small territories of Zips and Arva, which lie south of the Carpathians. After two weeks of fighting and nine months of negotiation, it has now been settled that the populations of these districts are to decide by plebiscite to which of the two new republics they wish to belong.

Much more serious and difficult has been the problem presented by Galicia. The western part of this province was from the earliest times an integral part of Poland and is overwhelmingly Polish today. There is no real question here, and the possession of Western Galicia has already been assured to Poland. But with the remaining two-thirds of the province, the case is altogether different.

Eastern Galicia was originally settled by a population historically known, and still commonly known as Ruthenians. They are a branch of that Little Russian race for which the general name Ukrainian is now coming into use. After belonging to various Ruthenian principalities in the early middle ages, Eastern Galicia was conquered by Poland in 1340; it remained a part of the Polish state down to 1772; and even under the Austrian rule the Poles have continued to be the dominant nation. Today the ethnographic situation in Eastern Galicia may be summarized by saying that the Ruthenians make up 59% of the total population, the Poles 27%, and the Jews 13%. Although usually in the minority, the Poles are found in large numbers in almost every part of the territory. Lemberg, the capital of the province, and most of the other large towns are mainly Polish and Jewish in population; and there are several large rural districts of Polish-speaking majority.

Socially and intellectually there is a striking contrast between the two rival races. The Ruthenians are almost entirely a peasant population, with only a small educated class of priests, lawyers, doctors, etc. The Poles are fairly evenly and normally divided among the various occupations and social classes. The difference may be shown by the fact that about 91% of the Ruthenian population is dependent upon agriculture for a living, and only 44% of the Poles; 39% of the Poles live by commerce and industry, but only 7% of the Ruthenians; 17% of the Poles are engaged in the liberal professions, but only 1% of the Ruthenians; 62% of the Ruthenians are illiterate, but only 23% of the Poles. In other words, the Poles are socially, economically, and intellectually the strongest element in the country, although in numbers they are considerably inferior to their rivals.

During the five or six centuries in which the two races have lived side by side, their relations have on the whole been relatively satisfactory and amicable. To a large extent they are so still, whenever the politicians do not intervene, as is shown, for instance, by the high percentage of mixed marriages. In the nineteenth century, however, a nationalist movement grew up among the Ruthenians, which assumed a marked anti-Polish tendency and which has led to the rather bitter racial feud that has raged in Eastern Galicia in the past thirty years. It is likely that this contest would never have assumed so fierce a character had it not been for the insidious activities of the Austrian government, which lost no opportunity to stir up the two races against each other, aiding now one and then the other in accordance with the traditional Austrian maxim, ‘divide and rule’. In the last twenty years the German government has also taken an active hand in the affair, secretly exciting and aiding the Ruthenians against the Poles; for the latter were always _the_ enemy for Berlin, and decades before Brest-Litovsk German statesmen appreciated the possibilities of the ‘Ukrainian idea,’ which might be used with equal effect against both Russia and Poland.

Nevertheless, the Ruthenian movement remained rather ineffective, both because the Galician Ruthenians were the poorest, most ignorant, and most backward of all the races of Austria, and because they were divided among themselves as to their goal. Two distinct national movements have really existed among them, in a population of three and a half millions. Part of them, the majority, apparently, maintained that they were a branch of the Ukrainian nation, and that their goal must be the ultimate formation of an independent Ukrainian state. The minority, on the other hand, asserted that there was no such thing as a Ukrainian nation: that the Galician Ruthenians and the people of the Russian Ukraine alike were simply a branch of the one great Russian nation, which stretched unbroken from the Carpathians to the Pacific. For these people, in theory at least, the goal was the union of Eastern Galicia with Russia.

For a nation so backward in its development, so divided against itself, and so accustomed to look to Berlin and Vienna for aid and direction, the World War arrived at the wrong moment: the World War and then the collapse of Austria and the crisis that was to decide the fate of Eastern Galicia.

At the moment of Austria’s spontaneous dissolution, one Ruthenian party hastened to set up a ‘Republic of the Western Ukraine,’ and, with the aid of certain Ruthenian units in the old Austrian army, attempted to seize possession of all Eastern Galicia. This led to a prolonged and unhappy struggle with the Poles, who were not disposed to submit to such a settlement of the question. For many months the fighting centred around the city of Lemberg, which long defended itself almost single-handed and with great heroism against superior Ukrainian forces. When at last the Polish government was in position to send large reënforcements, the issue was quickly decided: in June, 1919, the Ukrainian resistance collapsed, and the Poles occupied the whole country as far as the Zbrucz.

The fate of Eastern Galicia was thus more or less settled _vi et armis_, without the Conference and at times to the lively displeasure of the Conference. That the Allied and Associated Powers nevertheless finally sanctioned the Polish occupation of Eastern Galicia and are now apparently intending to place that country, provisionally at least, under the sovereignty of Poland, is a fact which has called forth no little criticism. It has been denounced as a craven surrender in the face of a _fait accompli_, a betrayal of principle, the sacrifice of three and a half million Ukrainians to the ravenous Polish imperialists, and much more to the like effect.

The chief justification of the Conference, I think, is to be found in the hard facts of the situation. The Ruthenians are indeed the majority in Eastern Galicia; the majority ought to rule; but it was very difficult to apply this principle in this particular case.

The Ruthenian majority was not at all agreed as to what it wanted. The Ukrainophiles among them were for an independent Ukrainian state; but the other party was altogether opposed to such an idea. This second party, however, had no more practicable program to offer than that the Allied governments should occupy and administer Eastern Galicia until such time as Russia was on her feet again and in condition to take over the country. If one might judge from the relative strength of the two Ruthenian parties as they existed before the war, the party which wanted an independent Ukrainian state might be a majority among the Ruthenians, but was only a minority in the total population.

It was rather doubtful, moreover, whether the Ruthenians were capable of taking over the government of the country. They had had no independent state for nearly six hundred years, and their national development had been so retarded and unsatisfactory that it was not easy to believe that they were fitted for independent statehood today. Where were the elements on which a solid state could be constructed? Such elements were not to be found in the ignorant and inarticulate masses of the peasants nor in the small class of intellectuals. These intellectuals had already given the measure of their ability: for six months they had tried to run a government, and the result--nearly all the many Allied officers who were sent in to study the situation were unanimous in the opinion that this Ukrainian government had been, to put it mildly, a sorry failure; and that the majority of the population--Poles, Jews, and Ruthenians alike--were relieved when this government collapsed and the Polish troops came in.

Eastern Galicia had been fought over for four years by Austrians and Russians, and then for a fifth year by Poles and Ukrainians. The country had suffered more than any other part of Eastern Europe. The Conference was anxious to assure to this war-racked and desolated region a return to orderly government and stable conditions as quickly as possible. This could not be effected by handing back the country to the local Ukrainian politicians, who had tried and failed; nor by handing it over to the so-called Republic of the Great Ukraine, represented only by the will-o’-the wisp government of the peripatetic Petlura. The Russian solution was practically out of the question for the present. The plan of international occupation and administration was indeed discussed, but none of the powers felt able or willing to undertake such a burden in that remote and inaccessible corner of Eastern Europe. Hence, the only practical solution seemed to be to entrust the Poles with the occupation and administration of the country, subject to certain guarantees to be stipulated in favor of the Ruthenians. The country had belonged to Poland for four hundred years; the Poles were politically and economically the most active, experienced, and capable element of the population; they were actually in possession of the country; and their occupation seemed to meet with the rather general approval of the inhabitants.

The final settlement of this question has not yet been made, however. There have been long negotiations between the Allies and the Polish government as to the terms under which Poland may be entrusted with the administration of Eastern Galicia, the autonomy which that province is to enjoy, and the special guarantees for national rights to be insured to the Ruthenians. No definitive agreement has yet been reached.

* * * * *

The eastern frontier of Poland is also still undefined, for reasons already indicated. At any rate, the Polish armies are now occupying a very wide area in the east. A year ago the Bolshevik forces had advanced almost to the borders of Congress Poland: today, after a certain amount of fighting, the Poles have thrust them back almost to the Dnieper. The Poles are now in possession of most of the old Russian provinces of Grodno, Wilno, Minsk, and Volhynia: i. e., of a very large part of those eastern territories which belonged to the old Polish republic and which have been the object of an age-long dispute between Poland and Russia.

What the ultimate fate of these regions will be, it would be difficult to forecast. The various nationalist movements which have sprung up in this area are of such recent date and such uncertain strength, that it would require much boldness to prophesy the outcome. Will Lithuania, for instance, consolidate itself as an independent state, or renew its old federal union with Poland, or return to Russia? Will the Ukrainians unite once more with Russia or establish themselves as a new state of 40,000,000 people? What will become of the White Russians, of all the peoples in this region the most enigmatic? The western section of them, being Catholic, may perhaps gravitate towards Poland; the eastern section, being Orthodox, may perhaps cleave to the side of Russia. Or will they develop a national movement of their own? When and in what fashion will a reorganized Russia be able to reassert her voice effectively in these questions? Such are some of the uncertainties in the case.

At all events, for the time being the Poles are again in possession of a larger part of their ancient heritage, of the Poland that existed before the Partitions. They are in possession of territories which, taken together, must contain a population of over thirty millions. And whatever fluctuations may still take place in her frontiers, Poland is likely to remain the largest and in many respects the most important of the new states produced by the war, the sixth most populous state in Europe.

While it would doubtless be premature to hail in this state, restored only yesterday and still in process of construction, a new Great Power, it is not impossible that Poland may in time become one. For, assuming that Upper Silesia comes to her by plebiscite, her economic resources are magnificent. The richest coal reserves on the Continent; zinc, lead, iron, petroleum in abundance; highly developed industries in the Congress Kingdom, which was the Lancashire of the Russian empire, and in Upper Silesia, which was the Black Country of eastern Germany--such are some of the assets with which Poland resumes her national life.

The greatest problem lies in the people themselves. Of them a writer by no means prejudiced in their favor has recently declared:

“In all Europe there is no other people, with the possible exception of the French, which is naturally so gifted. No one can study Eastern Europe without feeling that they are infinitely the most attractive of the peoples with which he has to do. They are the only ones in whose composition there is included that subtle _differentia_ which marks off the ‘big nation’ from the ‘small.’”[49]

On the other hand, it must be admitted that in the past the Poles have shown themselves deficient in organizing and administrative ability, in economic enterprise, in cohesion, solidarity, and discipline. A century and more of servitude to foreigners has not been the best of schooling for orderly and efficient self-government, nor has it permitted the nation to keep altogether abreast of the West in intellectual and economic progress. And Poland, wedged in between a vindictive Germany and a presumably none too friendly Russia, occupies what may fairly be called the most exposed and dangerous position in Europe.

Nevertheless, the brilliant and original genius of the Polish people; their ardent and unsurpassed spirit of patriotism; the lessons which they may be presumed to have learned from their misfortunes; the reassuring evidence supplied by their conduct during these last two critical years--all this affords ground for hope, not only that Poland has permanently recovered her independence, but that she is capable of becoming again what she was for so many centuries in the past: a bulwark of liberty, republicanism, and Western civilization in the troubled East of Europe.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

One of the most useful aids to the study of questions relating to Poland is Professor E. Romer’s admirable _Geographic and Statistical Atlas of Poland_, published in Polish, French, and German: Warsaw and Cracow, 1916. An English edition is soon to be issued.

Almost all sides of Polish life today, political, economic, intellectual, and artistic, are described in compendious and scholarly fashion, and with an abundance of maps, statistics, and historical information, in the works published during the War by the Committee for Encyclopaedic Publications on Poland. This Committee has published _La petite Encyclopédie polonaise_, Paris-Lausanne, 1916 (translated into English under the title: Poland, her People, History, Industries, Finance, Science, Literature, Art, and Social Development); and the larger _Encyclopédie polonaise_, Fribourg-Lausanne, 1917-19, of which vols. i (geography and ethnography), ii, pt. 3 (territorial development of Polish nationality--in four volumes), iii (economic life), and iv (political and administrative regime) have hitherto appeared.

A very convenient handbook of statistical data about Poland is the _Annuaire statistique polonais_ by E. Romer and I. Weinfeld, Cracow, 1917.

E. H. Lewinski-Corwin’s _Political History of Poland_, New York, 1917, is perhaps the best account of the subject available in English, although marred by a certain amount of patriotic exaggeration and party prejudice.

Among works dealing with the several territories which have been in dispute, the following are notable:

On Prussian Poland: Ludwig Bernhard, _Die Polenfrage_. Leipzig, 1910. (A moderate German view.) Joseph Partsch, _Schlesien_, pts. 1-2. Breslau, 1896-1911. “Liber” (C. Andrzejewski), _Das Deutschtum in Westpolen (Preussisch-Polen), seine Zahl, seine Gliederung, sein Stärkeverhältniss gegenüber den Polen_. Posen, 1919.

On the Galician question: W. Lutoslawski and E. Romer, _The Ruthenian Question in Galicia_. Paris, 1919. H. Grappin, _Polonais et ruthènes. La question de Galicie_. Paris, 1919. Both these works are partisan statements from the Polish side. M. Lozynsky, _Les “Droits” de la Pologne sur la Galicie_. Lausanne, 1917. E. Levitsky, _La Guerre polono-ukrainienne en Galicie_. Berne, 1919. This and the preceding represent the Ukrainian point of view.

On the question of Poland’s eastern frontier: L. Wasilewski, _Die Ostprovinzen des alten Polenreichs_. Cracow, 1916. By all means the most complete and illuminating survey of Poland’s past relations with Lithuania, White Russia, and the Ukraine, and of the recent growth of nationalist movements in those regions. K. Verbelis, _La Lituanie russe_. Geneva, 1918. (Lithuanian views and claims.) T. Savtchenko, _L’Ukraine et la question ukrainienne_. Paris, 1918. (Views of a Ukrainian nationalist.)

FOOTNOTES:

[43] Here and in the ensuing chapters the word ‘race’ is used in its popular sense, as virtually equivalent to ‘people’ or ‘nation,’ rather than in the strict sense in which the word is employed by ethnologists. R. H. L.

[44] The Peace Conference appears to have adopted last autumn some sort of a provisional boundary for Poland on the east. As far as I understand the matter, however, this boundary represents only a minimum line. Whatever lies to the west of it is indisputably Polish, and henceforth in the opinion of the Conference should belong unconditionally to Poland. It is not implied, however, that Poland may not have valid claims to additional territories farther east--claims which can only be settled by negotiations between Poland and Russia.

[45] If the territory of the Free City of Danzig be included in this reckoning, the number of Germans that may be separated from the Empire would rise to 2,400,000 in round numbers.

[46] This figure refers to that part of East Prussia which will unquestionably remain to Germany. If the Mazurian and Marienwerder plebiscite areas vote to remain with Germany, the number of Germans cut off from the _Reich_ by the Polish couloir will be a little over 2,000,000.

[47] The total population of the city and its district in 1910 was 324,000, of which number only 16,000 were entered in the census as having Polish as their ‘mother tongue.’

[48] I owe the comparison to Mr. L. B. Namier’s excellent article on “Poland’s Outlet to the Sea,” in _The Nineteenth Century_, Vol. 81 (1), Feb. 1917.

[49] Ralph Butler, _The New Eastern Europe_, p. 4.

VI

AUSTRIA

The Prince de Ligne, dying in the midst of the carnival of revelry that marked the Congress of Vienna, declared that he was preparing a new amusement for the jaded appetite of that assembly: the obsequies of a Field Marshal, a Knight of the Golden Fleece. A no less unique, but far graver, spectacle was provided for the Peace Conference of Paris: the obsequies of a great empire, the oldest and proudest in Europe.

Even without deploring that event, one cannot be altogether untouched by the spectacle of the collapse of the Hapsburg monarchy, with its stirring historic past and its illustrious traditions, the state which in one sense could trace its genealogy back to Charlemagne and Augustus Caesar, the realm of Charles V, the Ferdinands, Maria Theresia, Joseph II; the old indomitable

“Oesterreich,
An Ehren und an Siegen reich,”

of Wallenstein and Prince Eugene.

Austria had a raison d’être, had she only known how to live up to it. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, she rendered a real service to the peoples of Central Europe in uniting them into one realm capable of checking and repelling the Turkish flood. And later on, when the Turks had ceased to threaten, she might have acquired a new right to existence by educating her various races to self-government, offering them the advantages of membership in a large political and economic union combined with local autonomy and due respect for the rights and individuality of each race, anticipating in this realm, which, with its medley of nationalities, was a kind of miniature Europe, the solutions which the League of Nations will have to seek. After all, it was a Czech patriot who declared that if the Austrian monarchy did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.

But Austria has seldom risen to her opportunities. According to Napoleon’s well known saying, she was always just behindhand with an army or an idea. There was always something strangely inefficient, ill-adjusted, factitious, unhealthy, or fundamentally dishonest about her. As has often been remarked, Austria was not a nation, it was only a government--a dynasty, an aristocracy, a bureaucracy, and an army. A dynasty, which had an extraordinary passion and talent for acquiring land--“the most successful race of matrimonial and land speculators known to history,” someone has called them[50]--but which has shown very little constructive or executive ability in the tasks of internal government, and whose policy has been defined as simply one of “exalted opportunism in the pursuit of the unchanging dynastic idea”;[51] a kind of permanent camarilla about the throne, made up of sixty or seventy archdukes and archduchesses and a group of great aristocratic houses, so influential and exclusive that Mickiewicz described Austria as “an East India Company exploited by two hundred families”; a bureaucracy, dull, pedantic, arbitrary, and inefficient, whose ideal of government seldom rose above the typical Austrian motto “fortwursteln”--muddle along someway--; an army whose degree of internal cohesion is shown by the fact that its recruits swore allegiance to the emperor in nine languages, and which had an unequalled record for the number of its defeats; such were the chief forces that held this “ramshackle empire” together.

The task of maintaining and consolidating so motley a realm was, after the rise of the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century, increasingly and desperately difficult; but perhaps it would not have been an impossible undertaking, if the dynasty had only honestly carried out the principle of the equality of all the Austrian races, and if it had gone over, while still there was time, to a genuine federal state organization. But the Hapsburgs did neither. Instead they repudiated both ideas by adopting and for fifty years maintaining the Dualist system of 1867, which meant the division of the monarchy into two halves, each of which was to be ruled by a minority--the Germans in the one case, the Magyars in the other--at the expense, and in defiance of the wishes, of the Slavic and Latin majorities. That system has been called “the ruin of modern Austria.”

Of the workings of the system in Hungary something will be said in the next chapter. In the Austrian or Cisleithan part of the monarchy, Dualism led to incessant struggles, immense embitterment, and finally the virtual breakdown of constitutional government, and a return to a but slightly disguised absolutism.

The one thing that saved the system from total shipwreck was the antagonisms that existed, not only between the Germans and the majority opposed to them, but also between the various races of which that majority was composed. These antagonisms were sedulously fomented by the government itself. It is one of the worst sins of the Hapsburgs that, far from acting as peacemakers or even as impartial arbiters between their discordant races, they deliberately and systematically strove to aggravate national animosities and to fan the flames of discord, hoping to be able to play off one race against another in the authentic Turkish fashion, and seeming to imagine that Austria could subsist through internal dissensions, just as Poland was once thought to subsist through her anarchy. The Emperor Francis I congratulated himself that his peoples were aliens to each other and detested one another: each race could therefore be used as a jailer for some other race. “From their antipathies springs order,” he declared, “and from their mutual hatred the general peace.”[52] Francis Joseph might adopt as an official slogan _Viribus unitis_, but his practice was based much more upon the traditional maxim, _Divide et impera_. He and his agents are very largely responsible for that violent series of nationality conflicts which have raged in almost every province of the monarchy--that _bellum omnium contra omnes_, which has disgraced and poisoned the political life of Austria and paved the way for her complete disruption.

Out of these discords grew the World War, as a result of Austria’s effort to crush the most dangerous of the nationalist movements threatening her from within by striking at its outside source. But this War, which was to have saved her, turned out to be her ruin, not only by involving her in military disasters, but even more, perhaps, by accelerating her internal decomposition. Far from reinvigorating the monarchy by drawing all its races together in a great outburst of patriotism and a great common effort--as Teuton propagandists used to tell us that it had done--the War had just the contrary effect. The indignation of so many Hapsburg races at being forced to fight for a cause of which they disapproved; the attempt of the authorities to stifle this discontent by imprisoning, shooting, or hanging tens of thousands of people; the many signs that the Austrian Germans, intoxicated with enthusiasm for Prussia, were yearning to apply Prussian methods to their old domestic enemies and to make _tabula rasa_ of those inferior peoples who, as a German writer put it, were “only a burden upon history,” and could “serve only as mortar for a nobler race”; the consciousness that in case of a victory for the Central Powers Austria would emerge bound hand and foot to the chariot of Germany and the anti-German races were doomed; finally, and not least, the psychological effects of war-weariness and economic misery, which have more or less shattered empires better knit together than this one--all these things combined to raise to a white heat the discontent of the majority of the Hapsburg races and to make them resolve that they would stand this Austrian nightmare no longer, if the Allies would only hold out to them a helping hand.

The Allies had certainly had little serious intention of disrupting Austria, at the beginning or throughout the greater part of the War. The traditional belief that Austria was a “European necessity,” the illusion that she could serve as a bulwark against the expansion of Germany towards the southeast or of Russia towards the Adriatic, the hope that she might be detached from Germany and persuaded to make a separate peace, the fear that the disappearance of the monarchy would lead only to the ‘Balkanization’ of Central Europe and to chaos worse confounded--such ideas seem to have predominated at London, Paris, and perhaps Washington, even down to the last year of the War. As late as January 8, 1918, President Wilson, in formulating the Fourteen Points, still disclaimed the thought of impairing the integrity of Austria, and asked for her subject races nothing more than autonomy.

But in the spring and summer of 1918 a great change came over Allied policy with respect to the Austrian question. It would be difficult to say how far this change was due to a growing realization on the part of the Allies of the essential justice of the claims of the Austrian subject races; or to the failure of all hopes of inducing Austria to make a separate peace; or to the very clever diplomacy of the Czecho-Slovaks and the obligations under which the latter had placed the Allies by their services in Siberia and Russia. I am inclined to think, however, that the change was caused in very large part by the gradually maturing conviction that, to use Mr. Henderson’s phrase, ‘Germany, if she had not yet conquered her enemies, had at least conquered her allies’;[53] that Austria’s independence, gravely and progressively impaired ever since the formation of her alliance with Berlin in 1879, had now become definitely a thing of the past, so that if she continued to exist at all, it would be only as a satellite and tool of Germany, a German bridge towards the Near East, the gangway of Mitteleuropa. Certain declarations made from the highest quarters in Austria in July, 1918, after a meeting of the two Kaisers--declarations announcing the intention ‘to tighten the bonds between the two empires in the sense of a durable fellowship in time of peace,’ confirmed the fear of the formation of a Central European _bloc_ with a population of 120,000,000 and an active army of 12,000,000 men. If this scheme were realized, Germany would have doubled her power and won the War, even though she restored all the territory she had occupied. From all this the conclusion seemed plain that the only way for the Allies to defeat the Pan-Germanist plan and place a permanent check upon Prussian militarism was to disrupt Austria-Hungary and to form a series of national states along the eastern frontier of Germany. It was now the destruction of Austria that was a European necessity. Hence, in the summer of 1918, the Allied governments, one after the other, formally approved the claims of the two chief malcontent Hapsburg races, the Czecho-Slovaks and the Yugo-Slavs, to unity and independence, and the Czecho-Slovaks were even recognized as an allied and belligerent nation. These declarations, accompanied or soon followed as they were by the sudden change in the military situation, the rapid and unbroken series of Allied victories on every front, and the collapse of Bulgaria, sealed the fate of Austria-Hungary.

The dynasty did, indeed, experience a deathbed repentance. In that black month of October, when he was daily throwing himself on President Wilson’s doorstep, pleading his zeal for peace and his love for the Fourteen Points, Kaiser Karl was also promising mountains and marvels to his own subjects--the complete transformation of the monarchy into a federation of national states. Such a system adopted even a few years earlier might have saved Austria; but, as some one has remarked, at the point at which matters had arrived, ‘one might as well have talked of federating the Kilkenny cats.’[54] As the Czecho-Slovak National Council declared, the Austrian races were no longer to be duped by promises from Vienna, as to the value of which they had had a sufficiently long experience. “What we demand the government at Vienna will never give us, and couldn’t, if it wanted to.”[55]

In the course of thirty days the monarchy spontaneously split into fragments. Almost without opposition from the authorities, almost without a hand being raised in defence of the secular throne of the Hapsburgs, power passed to the National Councils improvised by the Czecho-Slovaks, the Yugo-Slavs, the Poles, the Ukrainians, the Roumanians, the Magyars, and even the German Austrians. November 12-13 the last of the Hapsburgs abdicated. It was a dissolution without a parallel, with the elemental force of a tidal wave.

When the Peace Conference met at Paris, it did not have to concern itself with the old question whether the maintenance of Austria was a European necessity. The Austrian peoples themselves had settled that question, with irrefragable logic and unmistakable finality. The territories of the defunct empire had already been partitioned, in rough, provisional fashion and not without a few miniature wars, among eight states corresponding to the eight principal nationalities of that Empire. Five of these states were reckoned at Paris as Allies--Italy, Roumania, Yugo-Slavia, Czecho-Slovakia, and Poland; two of them--Hungary and German Austria--ranked as enemies; while as to the Galician Ukrainians, Paris could never quite make up its mind whether to count them as friends, enemies, or neutrals. The main problem before the Conference, therefore, was, while making peace with the two enemy states mentioned, to effect a definitive division of the Hapsburg inheritance that would be just, practical, and conducive to the peace and security of Europe.

The difficulties of such a task are obvious enough, and will appear more fully in the discussion of the individual problems that follows. It is well known that Austria has been from the earliest times an open inn to half the travelling nations of Europe and Asia; that her rich plains are covered with ethnographic sediment deposited by a score of successive invasions; that her mountains, which are generally not too high and are pierced by plenty of easy passes, have served, not so much as barriers separating races, but rather as rallying places for weak or fugitive peoples seeking a refuge. Neither the Austrian Alps, nor the Carpathians, nor the mountains of Bohemia form an ethnographic frontier. Not one of the Austrian races is separated from its neighbors by really clearly marked natural boundaries. The historic political or administrative divisions are usually equally unsatisfactory as a basis for marking off the several nationalities from each other. In Hungary the county divisions are largely of very recent date, and really represent gerrymanders, intended, not to separate races, but to mingle them in such a way as to produce wherever possible a Magyar majority. In Austria almost all the political divisions were very old, and represented simply the débris of feudalism--the duchies, counties, and margraviates that took shape in the Middle Ages, when political formations had nothing to do with the principle of nationality. Of the seventeen crownlands or provinces of Austria, fourteen contained two or more races jumbled together. But however artificial and incongruous these provincial divisions might seem when judged from the standpoint of nationality, their very age or long continuance added another element of difficulty: it opened the door to claims based on ‘historic rights.’ Almost every one of the Hapsburg races had once had an independent state of its own; and where was the race so forgetful of its glorious past as not to claim the whole of every province which had once belonged to it, no matter what the present ethnographic situation might be? Indeed, since ‘ethnographic rights’ and ‘historic rights’ were so frequently in conflict, it was a common phenomenon that each race should use the one argument or the other alternately, as suited its purposes in each particular case, without much regard for that consistency which Bismarck called “the virtue of small minds.” The Czecho-Slovaks, for instance, claimed the whole of Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia by virtue of historic rights, regardless of the strong German and Polish majorities in various parts of those provinces. But when it came to the northwestern parts of Hungary, where they had no historic claim, and the Magyars a very good one, they shifted their argument completely to the basis of ethnographic statistics. One need not, however, be very severe on our allies for such inconsequences. There was “a deal of human nature” about most of them; and they can scarcely be called more illogical than those critics of the Peace settlement, whose hearts bleed for Ireland, Egypt, and India, but who are inconsolable over the destruction of “venerable, old Austria,” and who would much have preferred that the large Polish majority in Upper Silesia, made up mainly of oppressed peasants and workingmen, should have remained in the grip of the German minority of feudal magnates and capitalists.

The decisions of the Paris Conference with regard to the liquidation of Austria-Hungary are embodied in the Versailles treaty with Germany of June 28, and the treaty with German Austria signed at Saint-Germain-en-Laye on September 10. Untoward events have delayed down to the present the conclusion of peace with Hungary. The settlements hitherto made have not decided the fate of certain extremely contentious territories, which have been placed at the disposal of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers. Such is the case with nearly all the Adriatic territories in dispute between Italy and the Yugo-Slavs; and with various districts where plebiscites are to be held: i. e., Teschen, Zips (Szepes), Arva, and Klagenfurt. At any rate, with these exceptions, one can now discern pretty clearly the new territorial settlement in the lands of the former Hapsburg monarchy.

The northwestern portions of the monarchy have organized themselves, with the sanction of the Conference, as the republic of Czecho-Slovakia. The Czechs and Slovaks are two brother races, established, the one in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, the other in the northwestern parts of Hungary. According to the census of 1910, the Czechs numbered about six and one half millions; the Slovaks about two millions. Allowing for the peculiar methods of Austrian and Hungarian census-takers, one will hardly go far wrong in raising the total for the two peoples combined to about ten millions. This would make them the third, and perhaps even the second, largest nationality within the borders of the late empire.[56]

The degree of relationship between the Czechs and Slovaks is one not easy to define. According to the one view, which is popular especially among the Czechs, the two peoples represent an original ethnic and linguistic unit--a single race, which through historic accidents came to be separated for centuries and to be considerably differentiated in speech, customs, and character, although always preserving such close linguistic and moral ties that they deserve to be considered as one nation. According to the other view, which is advanced especially by certain Slovak scholars and politicians, the Czechs and Slovaks, in spite of all similarities and affinities, are, and always have been, two distinct and independent branches of the Slavic family, two nations, which have been drawn together chiefly by common misfortunes and common dangers and which may therefore, perhaps, find it expedient to contract a political union. At any rate, the following facts are clear. For many centuries the two peoples have had a common literary language; their writers and scholars long maintained that they were a single nation; and if in the last century an effort has been made to develop a distinct Slovak literary language, it has made no great progress. The two idioms today are so closely alike that the two peoples understand each other without difficulty. Politically, the Czechs and Slovaks have been separated throughout most of their history. After a brief period of union in the ninth and tenth centuries, they fell apart definitively in 1031. The Czechs continued to have a state of their own, the kingdom of Bohemia, while the Slovaks fell under the sway of the Magyars for the next nine hundred years. Nevertheless, geographic propinquity and linguistic, religious, and intellectual ties sufficed to keep up a strong sense of fellowship and interdependence between the two peoples. These feelings have been strengthened in recent years by the conviction that in their struggles against their respective tyrants--the Germans in the one case, the Magyars in the other--they were fighting a common battle and had better stand shoulder to shoulder. And when the World War brought an almost undreamed-of chance for complete liberation, Czechs and Slovaks were wise enough to see that the two peoples, so weak numerically and placed in so exposed and dangerous a position, had little chance of maintaining their independence unless they united. It is true that there has been a certain amount of friction, and that a section of the Slovaks have been protesting against what they call the absorption of their people by the Czech intruders. But this was inevitable. As far as one can learn, the majority of the Slovaks have accepted the union, whether as a marriage of reason or of affection; and the combination is so necessary, if both peoples are to escape being swallowed up again by the Magyars and Germans, that one can only hope that it will last. In sanctioning the idea for which the rather new name of Czecho-Slovakia was adopted, the Peace Conference assuredly believed that it was satisfying the wishes of both peoples, and confirming the only arrangement capable of insuring peace in this peculiarly important danger zone.

The main territorial problem that presented itself with respect to Czecho-Slovakia was whether the new state should, in its western, Cisleithan half, receive boundaries drawn to fit the ethnographic frontier, or whether it should obtain its historic boundaries--the boundaries of the old Czech kingdom, which included the whole of the provinces of Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia.

The problem was a grave one. The Germans formed 37% of the population of Bohemia; 28% in Moravia; 44% in Silesia. The three provinces contained a total of three and one half million Germans according to the last census. What was worse, these Germans are very largely gathered in compact masses, in a zone which wellnigh encircles the Czech-speaking territory, and which, on its outer side, was everywhere contiguous with Germany or German Austria. It would have been difficult to form this rather narrow ring of territory into an independent republic of German Bohemia, as some of its leading politicians demanded. Such a state would have been a politico-geographical monstrosity. But the peripheral territories might have been lopped off and handed over, in part to Germany, in part to German Austria, as the principle of nationality might seem to require. Moreover, it could not be forgotten that the Czechs and Germans of Bohemia were separated by centuries of struggles and animosities. Nowhere else in Austria had there been so bitter a conflict of nationalities in recent decades. In the mixed districts every village, one might almost say every house and every yard of ground, had been fought over. It had come to the point where Czechs and Germans could scarcely be brought to work in the same factory; where a small town might have to have two railroad stations--one for each race; where the propagandists of the rival nationalities competed in proselytizing even the inmates of the insane asylums. For the past ten years the Provincial Diet of Bohemia had been practically closed because of the violence of the race feud. Under such circumstances, could one think of including three and one half million Germans in the new Czech state?

Not without hesitation, the Peace Conference decided to preserve the historic frontiers of the old kingdom of Bohemia. That decision has occasioned much criticism; and indeed, among the decisions of the Conference, there is scarcely any other instance where so large a number of people have been placed under the sovereignty of another race. Nevertheless, I think that there is much justification for this settlement.

First and foremost, it should be observed that a strictly ethnographic frontier would have given an almost impossible and fatal configuration to Czecho-Slovakia. Even as it is now constructed, this state presents a somewhat fantastic appearance on the map. It looks like a tadpole. It is a narrow couloir about 600 miles in length, but in its eastern districts hardly 60 miles wide; and in Moravia, the province which forms the link between Bohemia and Slovakia, it is only 100 miles across. Now, if the frontier had been drawn on the ethnographic basis, these defects would have been aggravated in very dangerous fashion. Prague, the capital, would have been brought within about 30 miles of the German frontier. The Moravian link would have been little more than 50 miles wide. The state would have been constricted in the middle until it had much the shape of an hour glass. Czecho-Slovakia occupies a very perilous position. It is a wedge thrust into the side of Germany. For a thousand years the Czechs have been engaged chiefly in beating off the German onslaughts, and it is to be feared that in the future they will not be free from the same danger. Surrounded as they are on three sides by Germany and German Austria, they would, indeed, be in the gravest peril if, in case of a conflict, their enemies needed only to join hands across a gap 50 miles wide in order to cut the Czecho-Slovak state in two. If this state was to be created at all, it had to be created in a shape that would give it some guarantees of viability.

In the second place, if there are any cases where ‘historic rights’ deserve to be respected, this is probably one. The Czechs were the first of the two races to settle the country. It was they who founded and maintained the kingdom of Bohemia, which had so glorious a history in the Middle Ages and down to the time when it succumbed to Hapsburg despotism in the seventeenth century. Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia were the three constituent parts of this realm; together they made up ‘the lands of the Crown of St. Wenceslaus’; and down to the beginning of the nineteenth century even the Hapsburgs admitted that they owed their sovereign rights over these lands solely to their position as kings of Bohemia. If in the nineteenth century the effort was made to sweep away all vestiges of that kingdom and to merge it in the Austrian empire, the Czechs steadily refused to recognize these changes. They insisted that the kingdom of Bohemia still existed as a distinct entity, legally bound to the other Hapsburg lands only by the person of the common ruler; and they have fought for this principle and for that of the integrity and indissolubility of their realm with such tenacity that these ideas have become veritable dogmas in their minds. In sanctioning a Czech state including the whole of Bohemia and Moravia and most of Austrian Silesia, the Conference is not setting up a new and artificial creation: it is merely renewing and confirming in its old territorial limits a state which existed for centuries and which _de jure_, perhaps, has never ceased to exist.

The German populations in this state are in the main descended from settlers who were brought in by the kings of Bohemia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to clear and colonize the forests and waste lands, which then formed a girdle around the borders of the kingdom. These people voluntarily established themselves in a Czech land, and their descendants have always been subjects of the Czech state, save possibly during the last century or so when it is a contentious question whether a Czech state existed. At any rate, these Germans have never, since their immigration, belonged to Germany. And it may perhaps be doubted whether the presence of this German fringe is a sufficient reason for dismembering so ancient a state or a country so clearly marked out by nature to be a unit.

For Bohemia (the territory chiefly in question) has an extraordinary physical unity--greater than is possessed by any other country in Central Europe. This appears in its unusual river system, with its radial convergence of all the water courses towards the centre of the country; and not less in the mountain walls which guard the four sides of this natural citadel, especially the sides turned towards Germany. Were the political boundary to be removed from these mountains and carried down into the plain where the ethnographic frontier lies, this would mean exchanging a boundary that is excellent alike from the geographic, the economic, and the strategic standpoint for one that is quite the reverse.

Finally, it may be said that German-speaking Bohemia would suffer if cut off from the rest of the country. It is one of the most highly industrialized territories of Central Europe, the chief manufacturing centre of the old Austrian empire; and as such it has always been dependent upon the Czech agricultural region for its food supply and, in large part, its laborers. Moreover, it needs the markets which Czecho-Slovakia can furnish it at home or can open up to it in the southeast. The natural economic ties are so strong that not a few German Bohemians have, since the Armistice, publicly declared that their future can lie only in union with the Czecho-Slovak state, and that union with Germany would mean ruin for them. And from the Czech point of view, it is clear that the new state would have entered on its career with an almost fatal handicap, had it been deprived of its chief industrial districts and its main supplies of coal and other minerals.

Such were the reasons that led the Conference to depart rather widely in this case from its usual principles of boundary-making. The settlement seems to have been accepted by the parties most concerned without serious trouble and with far less friction than might have been expected. While some mistakes may have been made at the start, the Czechs have in general facilitated the transition by treating their old enemies in that generous, tactful, and sensible spirit which they have shown in most other matters, and which enables one to form very favorable auguries as to the future of their young republic.

Leaving the boundary questions of Slovakia to be considered in connection with Hungarian problems, we now pass on to German Austria.

* * * * *

It was the German-speaking provinces of the Eastern Alps, with their centre at Vienna, which formed the cradle or nucleus of the Austrian monarchy. It was there that the house of Hapsburg began its rise in 1276. And it is to this small mountain territory that the once proud name of Austria is again restricted. The new republic inherits only about one-fourth of the area of the old Austrian or Cisleithan half of the late empire. It is supposed to have a population of about six and a half millions, whereas Austria had twenty-eight and a half millions in 1910. In shape it is almost as elongated, as thin about the waist, as Czecho-Slovakia. It looks like an inverted pistol with the point aimed at Switzerland.

The making of the new Austrian frontiers involved several vexatious problems. On the north, indeed, it was resolved without much controversy to accept as the frontier between Austria and Czecho-Slovakia the historic boundary between Bohemia and Moravia on the one side, and the provinces of Upper and Lower Austria on the other. Only two slight deviations were made, both at the expense of Austria, in order to avoid cutting important railway connections.

It was the southern boundary that occasioned difficulties. As between the Austro-Germans and the Slovenes, who were to be united to the Yugoslav state, the effort was made to keep strictly to the ethnographic frontier. But this was not easy in so mountainous a region, where racial frontiers may take no account of geography, but political boundary makers cannot afford to do so.