Charles Pergler

“ To disregard it is to stand in the path of an ultimately irresistible force. The historical process of unification of various nationalities, which began with the German and Italian aspirations for a national state, ultimately will be consummated. ”

“ Austria can be no more federalized than European Turkey. To permit Austria to exist in any form when this war is concluded, is merely to delay the solution of a problem that will never down; and in the life of nations, as well as individuals, delay and procrastination, the tendency to postpone a final decision, are crimes for which penalties are sure to follow. ”

“ The Swiss have developed this will to coöperate, while in Austria it always has been unknown, and conditions are such that to hope even for its inception would be wholly utopian. Nor can we point to the United States of America as an example, because we are after all a nation formed by the free will of immigrants of various origins, and with an underlying basis of uniformity of outlook, uniformity of language, and uniformity of culture, furnished by the original settlers in this country who came from England.
Nationality is the modern state-forming force. ”

“ This question of national minorities will of course have to be worked out in detail, but judging from the way Bohemian cities and communes have handled the problem of German minority schools, it may be safely predicted that there will be no oppression of German minorities, no more than there was during the centuries that Bohemia, was an independent state. ”

“ Russia is no more an autocracy, and henceforth will be a democratically governed country. Thus remains unsolved only one major international problem involving the rights of small nations, speaking of nations in the ethnical sense and as distinguished from states. The allied note to President Wilson demands the liberation of Italians, Slavs, Roumanians and Czecho-Slovaks from foreign domination. The Czechs and Slovaks ask for the reconstruction of an independent Bohemian-Solvak state. All this postulates the dissolution, or at least a very serious diminution, of Austria-Hungary. ”

“ The federalization of the Austro-Hungarian Empire has become impracticable, if not wholly impossible. The case of Switzerland is hardly in point. Mr. Toynbee defines nationality as a will to coöperate, and a nation as a group of men bound together by the immanence of this impulse in each individual. ”

“ To again paraphrase another of the President’s statements, the world could not be at peace because its life would not be stable, because the will would be in rebellion, because there would not be tranquillity of spirit, because there would not be a sense of justice, of freedom and of right. ”

“ One cannot help remarking that prior to this war those now worrying over the possible oppression of a German minority by a majority of Czecho-Slovaks were little concerned about the oppression of the majority by the minority, which has been going on for centuries. It should also be noted that a policy of denationalization of other peoples is one peculiar almost wholly to the Germans. ”

“ It should be emphasized that the economic strength of the new states would be reinforced by the undeveloped resources of Slovakia, the inhabitants of which form a part of the same ethnic group as the Bohemians, and desire to be joined with the Bohemians in one state. ”

“ With Russia liberalized, the spirit of nationalism, which must not be confounded with chauvinism, will be intensified, and Russia will never again look with equanimity upon the Asiatic oppression of Slovaks by the Magyars, to cite a single illustration. ”

“ We should thus be confronted with a situation which President Wilson in his address to the Senate described as the ferment of spirit of whole populations fighting subtly and constantly for an opportunity to freely develop. ”

“ A leading advocate of permanent peace recently suggested that the question of national minorities might be solved to a large degree by a system of judicious exchange of such minorities, or of various members thereof. ”

“ For instance, Vienna has a large number of Bohemians, and the question of the Bohemian minority in this city has always been quite acute. A large number of these people might be repatriated and their place taken by Germans living in Bohemia, who originally were colonists in any event. ”