Jaroslav František Smetánka

“ And now, at the end of the year, so momentous in the history of Bohemia, President Wilson, the one man in whom Bohemian hopes were centered, declares that “we do not wish in any way to impair or to rearrange the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is no affair of ours what they do with their own life either industrially or politically.” ”

“ But pending any such authoritative pronouncement, a resolution passed in the Congress of the United States declaring the Slavs and Latins of Austria to be friends will encourage wonderfully the dejected spirits of the victims of German-Magyar oppression. It is time for America and her Allies to realize that they have little to hope from the ruling races and from the emperor of Austria, but that thirty-two million Austro-Hungarian subjects will use every means to further the cause of the Allies, if only they feel sure that the Allies will not abandon them in the end. ”

“ The middle part of the nineteenth century is known in history as the period during which the principle of nationality determined the course of events in Europe. The wars for the liberation of Italy, for the unification of Germany, for the redemption of Balkan Slavs from Turkish yoke, all had their reason in the overwhelming desire of peoples who felt a strong consciousness of unity to have that unity expressed and embodied in a national state. ”

“ The last speaker, Duke Colonna di Cesaro, emphasized Italy’s special interest in Bohemia. “In England and France there still are people who dream about Austria, as it used to be before 1866, an Austria that would be a rival of Germany and might be attached to the anti-German alliance. And so they would preserve Austria and would not hesitate to sacrifice to it the sacred national rights of subject races. In Italy there are no such illusions. Italy knows Austria, as the Czechs know it. ”

“ The truth is—and the authorities in Washington, as well as all intelligent Americans are aware of it—that the Slavs, Roumanians and Italians of Austria-Hungary hate the cause of Germany far more bitterly and passionately than native-born citizens to whom Europe is only a name. Our government has found it necessary at first to institute a campaign of education, because the people as a whole did not realize the great issues of the war. ”

“ In all probability it matters little that the Bohemian nation spurned the rich bribe tendered them by the young emperor. He could not have carried out his word, even if we take it for granted that he would want to do so. Kaiser Karl is not a free agent; he is a dependent of Kaiser Wilhelm. Austria dances as Germany plays. There is no doubt, for instance, that Charles was anxious to avoid a break with the United States, but Germany needed a proof to convince the world that it can still dispose of the resources of Austria-Hungary, and Emperor Charles sent Penfield home. ”

“ To create a barrier of independent Slav republics from the Baltic to the Adriatic—free Poland, free Bohemia, free Jugoslavia—out of the ruins of the present tyrannic, medieval Hapsburg empire, is the peace program of the Allies. The United States is trying to avoid the mistakes made by the Allies in the early, days of the war; the benevolent attitude toward Austria is one of those mistakes which should not be repeated by this country. ”

“ Would the peace of Europe be secure, if four million people, the most advanced part of the Little Russian nation, remained in Eastern Galicia, Bukovina and Northeastern Hungary under German and Magyar rule, while from thirty to thirty-five million of their brothers enjoyed full national freedom right across artificial boundary lines? Of the varied races of Austria-Hungary Czechoslovaks and Magyars alone are contained entirely within the monarchy. ”

“ There has been for generations a very close intellectual and spiritual connection between the Slavs of Austria and the tremendous mass of Slavs of the Russian empire. Since 1867, when a great pilgrimage of Bohemians and other Slav subjects of Francis Joseph went to Moscow as a protest against the division of the Hapsburg empire into a German and a Magyar sphere, every significant movement in Russia found an echo in the monarchy to the southwest, and every injury to the Slavs of the Danube realm aroused resentment among the people of Holy Russia. ”

“ To the Czechoslovaks the Dual Empire is a jail in which their national life is being strangled to death, while to the Magyars it is a means to make the home of their race coterminous with Hungary and even expand it into the Balkans at the expense of the Slavs and Roumanians. Bohemian and Slovak democracy demands the break-up of Austria-Hungary in order that their nation may live in a free state ”

“ It is not necessary to dwell at length on the conflict of the Italian and Polish national aspirations with the integrity of Austria. When the union of Italy was accomplished after Austria’s defeat in the wars of 1859 and 1866, small fractions of the Italian people in the Trentino and around Trieste remained subject to the Hapsburgs. Italy will not rest, until these her children are united to the rest of the nation of which they feel themselves to be a part. ”

“ The war has become definitely one of democracy against autocracy, and that means that if democracy wins, there will be no room for “monarchies”, as Austria-Hungary is officially known, especially monarchies that hang together only through common subjection to a ruler by divine grace and that would fall to pieces the moment that the force majeure holding them together is overthrown.
The Russian revolution had a double effect on the internal situation in Austria-Hungary. It made it clear on the one hand to Emperor Karl that concessions must be made to the Slavs of his empire. ”

“ One must emphasize over and over again that Austria-Hungary and the Hapsburg dynasty cannot be separated; the existence of the empire depends absolutely on the maintenance of the dynasty. The dynasty is German and has found its support in the past in the German minority. The Hapsburg empire represents the rule of majority by minority, and as long as it continues, Europe will be in a state of unstable equilibrium. ”

“ It proved impossible to suppress eight million determined people who set their faces dead against the unjust war. The second reason which had a great weight with the new emperor arose directly out of the attitude of the Czech race toward the war and the German plans of conquest. When the Allies announced to the world that their conditions of peace involved the disruption of the Hapsburg empire, the statesmen of Vienna could close their eyes no longer to the fact that policy of repression was dangerous. ”

“ And while Germany, a real nation, cannot be destroyed even when completely defeated, Austria which is only a government and not a nation, will not be spared by the Allies, if its various races do not ask to have it preserved. ”

“ Thus England has its alien element in the Irish for whom patriotism means something far different from devotion to the United Kingdom. In Germany the people of the lost provinces and the Poles in the East look upon the state within which they are held by force as an enemy, while Russia has of all the national states the largest admixture of foreign elements. There are two states, however, whose very existence is a denial of the principle of nationality—Turkey and Austria-Hungary. ”

“ Of the Germans the largest part was born in Germany, a considerable minority in Austria-Hungary and several hundred thousands in Russia. Most of the immigrants from the Dual Empire belong to races that not only do not sympathize with the Teuton cause, but are far more anxious to defeat Germany with its domineering ambitions and ruthless methods than the average American citizen whose patience has only recently been roused to the point of war. ”

“ Among the many problems which the United States will face upon declaring the state of war not the least will be the problem of the foreign-born population. It has proved to be an embarrassing one in all the belligerent countries, but in America it is one of unusual dimensions. ”

“ Bulgaria found itself on the German side partly from hate of its neighbor and cousin, Serbia, party through the crooked politics of its German king, and Turkey hardly knows at all, how it came to deliver itself to Germany. Among the numberless races of newcomers in the United States, two only need be considered as possible enemies, the Germans and the Magyars. ”

“ Polish part of Galicia into the re-united, independent Poland would leave the Little Russian districts of Austria-Hungary almost cut off from the main body of the empire. Now the four million Ukrainians of Austria have been the leaven by which the big mass of more than thirty million Little Russians in the southern governments of Russia have been brought to the consciousness that they are a distinct nationality. ”

“ At the beginning of the twentieth century most of the states of Europe were national states. France, England, Germany, Italy, Spain, even Russia are political formations in which for the great majority of the population the terms nation and state are synonymous. ”

“ It was the Italian minister Bissolati who first of the responsible states men of the Allied countries demanded in October 1916 the dissolution of Austria-Hungary and the liberation of its subject races, among whom he named the Czechs. Even today, when Bohemia has so many warm sympathizers in France, England, Russia and the United States, Italy is the only country in which friends of Bohemia have created their own organization for the express purpose of aiding the fight for Czechoslovak liberation. ”

“ We who know the real sentiments of the President, the many difficulties of his exalted position, the widely different and widely scattered audiences to all of whom his speech was addressed, feel that the President of the United States is not callous to the sufferings of the subjects races of Austria-Hungary under the tyrany of their German and Magyar rulers. ”

“ It was therefore unthinkable that the complete overthrow of the old order of things in Russia should leave Austria untouched. Especially in Hungary and Galicia, where the comparatively low degree of popular education interfered with the growth of racial patriotism and favored blind obedience to hereditary monarch, the revolution among the kindred race of Russians aroused dangerous discontent which made concessions advisable. ”

“ That means that in many districts American citizens in the deferred classes, men with families, will be called out in the next draft, while other be called out in the next draft, while in other districts only men without dependents will be selected. There is a simple remedy for all this unfairness both to the alien and to the American registrant. Less than 20% of the Austro-Hungarian subjects in this country are Germans and Magyars who alone deserve to be classed as enemies, because their kinsmen on the other side fight willingly on the side of our enemies. ”

“ Those that appreciate the real significance of the European struggle realize that it is due to the imperialistic tendencies of the German race. Germans look upon themselves as a race of lords—Herrenfolk—a chosen people destined to rule the world and incidentally to confer upon the weaker races the benefits of German kultur. ”

“ Although the natives of Germany outnumber the natives of the Dual Empire in the United States, the former are for the most part naturalized, while among the latter, comparatively recent arrivals as they are, a large majority are still aliens. Of the many races of Austria, Bohemians alone compare favorably with the Germans in naturalization percentages. ”

“ The medieval ceremony of coronation means to the Americans merely a gorgeous pageant which it is worth while to witness, even if one has to pay a stiff admission fee. To the subjects of European monarchies, and particularly to the inhabitants of those parts of the Hapsburg empire that were formely independent states, coronation still means much the same thing that it signified for their ancestors five hundred years ago. ”