WORLD CONVALESCENCE
We had become so habituated to war and its machinery, its incidents and
horrors, its demands and entailments, that when we were thrust suddenly
into a new world with whose conduct and ordering we were unfamiliar we
had the sensation of one who comes from long tenancy of a dark room into
the glare of sunlight, the feeling of unreality of one who emerges from
a delirium. The abdication of emperors, their flight and their fate
distracted us for a moment; the abyss into which the Central Empires of
Europe had been hurled arose before our eyes; the needs of the
unfortunates in the devastated districts and of those struggling to get
back to their native land made appeal to us; thoughts of future work and
play occurred to us, but none of them engrossed us. Though saturated
with the joy of deliverance no one gave himself over to revelling in it.
Groping in darkness as we have been for so long, we blinked and gasped,
trying to accustom ourselves to the divine light of the new day that had
dawned, and to discern and define beauties which the new world would
present. We were like a person who had suddenly been liberated from a
danger that not only threatened his life but made existence
insupportable. Utterance could not give such thoughts relief. Only
appreciative silence could express his gratitude.
In the lull or convalescence that came after the world's injury and long
illness, peace terms were formulated, indemnities exacted, the map of
Europe remade, and compacts formulated and signed to prevent another
holocaust. Thus the greatest venture the world ever embarked upon will
end. Then will come the great task--reconstruction of the world's
institutions.
The question that has fatigued the human mind since time immemorial,
"What shall man do that he may live again?" is for the hour replaced by
another more likely to be answered, "What kind of a world will the one
just wrought be in which to live, and when will it be habitable?" The
old world has been delivered of a promising offspring. Its travail was
terrible and sanious. The accoucheur had to call to her aid the counsel
and service of many nations, but the new-born world gives promise of
great tidings. Grief for the old world that yielded its existence in the
agony of deliverance is engulfed by the joy that has come in
contemplation of the beauty, purity, and immaculateness of the new
world, in which liberty shall be as free as the air in which it is
suspended.
What will this new world that is arisen from the destruction of empires
and from the ashes of tyrannical institutions be like? In what way will
it be better and more satisfying than the one that existed previous to
the war? What are the benefits that will flow from the sacrifices that
have been made? What are the rewards that will follow the labor and
effort expended to win the war? What are the mercies that will be
vouchsafed us for our deeds of commission and of omission? How shall
things be ordered that man, mere man, without other possession than
intelligence, without other aspiration than to be permitted to display
his dominant instincts,--love and constructiveness,--without other
ambition than to enjoy life and make others enjoy it, may be worthy of
his mission and deserving of its reward? These are the questions that
are occupying the mind of every thinking person in the whole world
to-day.
Before any one of them can be answered the fate of the former Central
Empires must be settled, because the Allies must know with whom they are
dealing and how much they are deserving of confidence and trust, and how
much they can be relied upon to carry out the terms of any agreement. We
may be absolutely certain that recent advantageous treaties will be
abrogated and that territories appropriated in the last half-century
will be restored. That which we cannot feel reasonable assurance of is
what form of government the former Central Empires will have, or whether
that which they bring forth will not be, in reality, a resurrected
Trojan horse, the Teuton's contribution to political camouflage.
The spokesmen of these newly formed governments say they will be
democracies. But who are the spokesmen? Are they not of them who until
yesterday were fighting for the preservation of the country and
government which had been selected by God and by themselves to thrust
"Kultur" upon the world, and which had been wantonly attacked by its
neighbors on the north, the south, the east, and the west? Did they
admit until that fateful yesterday that their government was not
perfect, or at least possessed of only such trifling imperfections that
they, the Socialists of one kind or another, could readily remove them?
Nothing has transpired in Germany since the abdication of the Kaiser, so
far as we have been informed, that permits us to say with anything like
assurance what form of government Germany hopes to have. All that we
really know is that the government has fallen into the hands of the
German Socialists, the deeply dyed-in-the-wool Socialists and the
Socialistic Democrats. So far as one can predicate judgment on the
reported sayings of the spokesmen of either of these two parties, the
purpose of the present government is to save as much as it can of the
previous régime and to continue it, minus the Kaiser and the war lords.
In none of the addresses or communications of any of these spokesmen is
there any real admission of defeat, any intimation of humility, any
indication of having been lessoned, nor, indeed, of anything that can be
interpreted as recognition of the fact that Germany has been the victim
of _Grossenwahn_, megalomania, which prompted and compelled her to a
line of conduct which conditioned her destruction. On the contrary,
everything that has been said has a note of determination to
rehabilitate herself in order that she may take the leading position,
morally, intellectually, commercially, in the world. At the very moment
when admission that she had lost the war was forced from her, and while
she was prostrate on the field of battle and in a state of collapse in
every acre of her territory, instead of silence and of resignation,
instead of an indication of that humility which tauts the heart-strings
of the conqueror, there was clamor of exultation setting forth the
virtues of the people and their ineradicable potentialities. Having been
denied victory on the field of battle, if that _Gott_ who was their
_Feste Burg_ does not desert them, they will now win a greater
victory--they will show the world that they can conquer themselves and
convert defeat into victory. They are without shame and without modesty.
They ask for succor from the nation which less than eighteen months ago
was a negligible quantity and which four years ago was made up of
drivelling idiots and men mad with lust for wealth. "You will not let
countless thousands of women and children die of starvation." No, we
shall not let them starve, but we shall have adequate care that never
again will it be within your power to thrust the mailed fist of one
extremity upon the honest, God-fearing people of the world while with
the other you snatch the food from the mouths of those unable, because
of age or infirmity, to provide for themselves.
One does not fail to detect the ring of exultation with which they say
that they will win the greatest of all victories--that of showing that,
though defeated in arms, they can be masters of themselves. They have no
recognition whatsoever that the destruction of mediæval imperialism and
the unfurling of the flag of liberty have been due to valor and
sacrifice of the peoples of the whole world, who have accomplished it
without other motive than to make the world a fit place in which an
honest man can live. In short, they are endeavoring to make it seem that
their defeat in the material control of the world by the German sword is
to be an opportunity for a great German triumph.
At this distance it is impossible to distinguish between the arrogance
of the German Kaiser and his supporters and the arrogance of the German
Socialists. They have every appearance of being born of the same
monstrous mother made big of Satan. That which the latter are now
stating they can do is the same as the Kaiser and his cohorts of
authority, founded in divine rights, thought they could do and set out
to do a quarter of a century ago. The Germans are as intoxicated with
their own vanity, their own self-sufficiency, their own divine mission
and potentialities to-day as they have been at any time in the twentieth
century.
No one denies that Germany defeated may make any attempt at government
which she chooses. At the same time no one can abrogate the right of the
conquerors to see to it that the form of government which she institutes
and which she attempts to carry into operation shall not be one that
militates against the success of the ideals for which the Allies have
striven, not for themselves alone but for the whole world. It needs no
prophetic vision to discern in the expressions of dictatorial arrogance
of those who have taken the government in hand in Germany the same
assumption of superiority which led to their defeat, the greatest the
world has ever seen. In brief, as we see it to-day, the effort in
Germany at the present time is to substitute one kind of class interests
for another which was admitted by the world's best judges to be not only
pernicious but destructive of liberty. If the former was of such a
nature, why does not the latter partake of it? If there were any
indications of sincere desire to establish an honest form of democratic
government in Germany, there is no doubt that its originators and the
whole German people would soon realize that they were dealing with a
magnanimous conqueror, but in view of the fact that the wild beast has
now in its agonal days the same snarl, the same venom, and the same
sharp teeth that it had when it was lusty and well-nourished, it is
necessary that the conquerors should harden their hearts and judiciously
guard the springs and cisterns of their generosity.
Promises of Germans should no longer be adequate. We should demand
deeds, and not only that but that they should be backed by the sentiment
and determination of the whole people and not of those who in
maintaining that they speak for them speak only for themselves and their
malignant ambitions. Teutonic tradition and authority must be replaced
by Jeffersonian, Mazzinian, Wilsonian liberty and justice.
It would be well for the whole world to realize that we are on the
threshold of the most fundamental transformation that the human mind can
conceive. We have been so long accustomed to the institutions and
conventions that constitute authority and privilege that it is almost
impossible for any one to realize that they are about to cease to exist.
Not only has the death-knell of such class privileges been rung, but
likewise that of institutions which have stultified intellectual growth
and moral supremacy, and amongst them none has more importance than
organized religion, that is, religion which claims to be authoritative
in so much as its directors or trustees--call them what you
may--formulate a dogma to the teaching of which all others must conform
in order that they may have life everlasting. People's religion must be
left to the free choice of the people.
Few of us realize that the curtain rung down on the 11th of November,
1918, was the closing of the second act in that great drama of which the
first act was the French Revolution and of which the third and closing
act will be devoted to social and political reconstruction. The majority
have some ill-defined notion or thought that we shall go back to the
kind of world that existed previous to August, 1914. There isn't the
smallest chance of it. I doubt whether even those who have had a vision
of the impending transformation realize, however, how great or
far-reaching the change will be. The time has come when the people are
going to rule the world. They are going to administer its affairs in
such a way that every man and woman capable of taking thought will have
opportunity to be heard and will be privileged to live without
authority, whose purpose it is to make the masses conform to a line of
conduct that will make for the advantage of the few, favored by birth or
fortune which may have been their birthright or their acquisition. For
years the word socialism and that for which it stands have been redolent
of bad odor. This war has purged it of its disagreeable connotation, and
to-day that which is meant by socialism is equivalent to the rights of
man. In the minds of many socialism and anarchy are synonymous, but in
reality the socialism which the war just finished has nurtured to a
lusty youth is much freer from anarchy and from the potentialities of
destruction than the reign of autocracy, of capital and of bosses, which
it supplanted.
I realize that it is difficult to defend this position in view of what
is happening in Russia. To-day the bugaboo to the world's children is
Bolshevism; that is what will "get us if we don't look out." When a riot
breaks out anywhere nowadays it is Bolshevism. It has become a
shibboleth, a name to conjure with, this social and political experiment
in organized and carefully planned violence that has been carried out by
the Jews in Russia since the conclusion of the peace of Brest-Litovsk.
The word has suddenly come into wide-spread use and it is being given
the connotation of socialism. In truth it is the socialism of the young
Russia. Its theory is a perverted Marxism and its practice is an
envenomed Hindenburgism. The etymology of the word Bolshevism as a name
for a pseudopolitical party finds its origin in the programme of the
party itself, that is, in the ultraradical tendencies of "Maximilist
extremists" professed by the party leaders, Lenine, Trotzky, and
Sinowjew. The leader Lenine said of the Bolsheviks in a moment of
frankness: "For every genuine Bolshevik of my party there are sixty
idiots and thirty-nine rascals," and no one can doubt his fitness to
judge. We should not forget that the Russian public that looks on Lenine
as its idol is honeycombed with deserters, ruffians, and at least three
hundred thousand common criminals who were liberated from the prisons
and from exile in Siberia by the revolution.
The Bolsheviks are neither a party nor are they the expression of
democratic and revolutionary Russia, as a great many persist in
believing. They are a mob drunk with ultraradical doctrines, who from
exceptional circumstances have become able to seize the power,
dominating with methods ferociously reactionary a hundred and twenty
million individuals. And the world is witnessing in astonishment the
spectacle offered by these bandits who, illegally holding the state
power, arbitrarily decide the fortunes of a whole people after having
allured them with fallacious promises, betraying them before the enemy.
The absolute unpreparedness of the Russian people--eighty per cent is
illiterate--to pass into a régime of democracy and social autonomy has
facilitated the successes of the Bolsheviks, whose "ideas" or
conceptions, as expressed in the programmes of Lenine, Trotzky, et al.,
consist in carrying "persuasion" to the majority of the ignorant masses.
Such "ideas" are first of all that the "proletariat has not and must not
have a country." "The issue of the World War is of interest to the
proletariat only from the point of view of the possibility for them to
take advantage of the general situation, doing everything in order to
turn the war of the states into a war of classes."
The bastard Bolshevism of present-day Russia professes, furthermore, the
conception formerly considered as purely anarchic that "the property of
others does not exist"; theft and violence are the normal means of
exchange; liberty of speech is non-existent; neither press liberty nor a
free literary production exists, because the Bolsheviks are exercising a
censorship more tyrannical than the ill-famed imperial censorship. Their
methods of coercion are to bring about financial exhaustion by means of
fines and indemnities; physical exhaustion by means of enforced labor
and confiscation of food supplies, and moral exhaustion by removing the
foundations upon which individual life is integrated, removing all
dominant objects, such as desire for scientific or artistic creation,
religious principle, or strong and lasting affections. It is not only
the dictatorship of proletariat which the Bolsheviks are trying to
establish but a dictatorship of tyranny, and they use every conceivable
means, showing themselves especially rabid against the well-to-do
classes, against the intellectuals, against capitalism and militarism.
The application of all this "programme" carries with it, as a first
consequence, the complete dissolution of every state form, in the
political sense as well as in the economic sense. The disorganization is
complete; hunger, by which the masses see themselves threatened,
increases the spread of every form of criminality and violence. The
destruction of every sentiment of individual responsibility and the
abolition of religious faith contribute to take away from the class of
those who are better fitted to resist morally every obstacle and
restraint in the choice of their actions. It is the "universal
destruction," it is the madness of the _après nous le déluge_!
The position of the Jews, radically changed after the revolution of the
spring of 1917, which gave them equal rights with the rest of the
population of Russian origin and religion, has had its triumph in the
recent manifestations of Bolshevism. In fact, besides Trotzky, whose
real name is Braunstein, there is a high percentage of Jews among the
mob leaders and dictators of the "soviet" (councils) by which every city
is administered, forming in this way an infinite number of "small social
republics" in every part of the vast Russian territory.
The words of one of the most profound connoisseurs of the Russian soul,
Dostoievsky, words which, alas, are prophetic not only of the concrete
facts, but also of the general dangers which threaten his country,
portray the condition that has come to pass.
"Our people, in the immense majority, adapt themselves cheerfully
to the hardest discipline, and it is the easiest thing in the world
to drag them toward the most noble deeds or toward the most ignoble
crimes. I tremble to think of what these good people are capable of
doing if they are left, even for a moment, without discipline.
Alas, side by side with them there are always some evil spirits,
full of envy, thirsty of power, with their soul filled with selfish
passions and bad instincts; it is they who always exercise a
mysterious and nefarious influence on the Russian mobs. I had a
striking example of this when the whole population of a prison,
about four thousand persons, was supinely submitting to the will of
one of these demons who took advantage of them. Nobody dared to
murmur. The Russian needs an idol; he feels the need of bending, of
being guided, of obeying. Free the Russian people of a leading
power which they willingly followed and they will immediately
create for themselves another dominator more obnoxious and
nefarious. Let God preserve us when the crowd of the weak ones will
follow under the power of the wicked ones. What a horrible
spectacle we shall witness then! What atrocities! What useless
slaughter! We shall see the country and religion betrayed; we shall
see Russia fall the prey to external enemies; we shall see material
servitude, the loss of all our acquisitions, the oblivion of all
the affections. Let God save me from seeing this turning-point in
Russian history!"
God saved him, but this mercy was not extended to us. We shall have to
be witness of Russia groaning under the system of bloodless terror, but
it will not be for long. In theory the Bolsheviks desire the same thing
as the Socialists; in practice they want it plus revenge, that which has
been the motivating characteristic of the Jew since time immemorial.
Their power is founded in resources which I suspect are largely in
America, and their agents have been granted citizenship and protection
in practically every country of the world. So soon as the motives of
their supporters then shall be widely known, and so soon as their
monstrous practices shall be revealed to the whole world, this malignant
exuberance that has developed upon the healthy growth of Liberalism and
Socialism will be removed by a giant cautery wielded in a hand more
powerful than that of Hercules.
A decree recently issued by the Bolsheviks of Vladimir, published in
that official Soviet organ _Izvestija_, and now beginning to be widely
published by European papers, will be relished by many in the U. S. A.,
where unquestionably the Bolsheviks have largely been financed.
"Every girl who has reached her eighteenth year is guaranteed by
the local Commissary of Surveillance the full inviolability of her
person.
"Any offender against an eighteen-year-old girl by using insulting
language or attempting to ravish her is subject to the full rigors
of the Revolutionary Tribunal.
"Any one who has ravished a girl who has not reached her eighteenth
year is considered a state criminal, and is liable to a sentence of
twenty years' hard labor unless he marries the injured one.
"The injured, dishonored girl is given the right not to marry the
ravisher if she does not so desire.
"A girl having reached her eighteenth year is to be announced as
the property of the state.
"Any girl having reached her eighteenth year and not married is
obliged, subject to the most severe penalty, to register at the
Bureau of Free Love in the Commissariat of Surveillance.
"Having registered at the Bureau of Free Love, she has the right to
choose from among men between the ages of nineteen and fifty a
cohabitant-husband.
"Remarks: (1) The consent of the man in the said choice is
unnecessary; (2) the man on whom such a choice falls has no right
to make any protest whatsoever against the infringement.
"The right to choose from a number of girls who have reached their
eighteenth year is given also to men.
"The opportunity to choose a husband or a wife is to be presented
once a month.
"The Bureau of Love is autonomous.
"Men between the ages of nineteen and fifty have the right to
choose from among the registered women, even without the consent of
the latter, in the interests of the state.
"Children who are the issue of these unions are to become the
property of the state."
The "decree" states further that it has been based on the excellent
"example" of similar decrees already issued at Luga, Kolpin, and
elsewhere.
A similar "Project of Provisional Rights in Connection with the
Socialization of Women in the City of Hvolinsk and Vicinity" was
published in the _Local Gazette_ of the Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies.
I am not sure that this lurid conduct of the Bolsheviks will do the
cause of social reconstruction harm. I recall the conduct of the
promoters of woman-suffrage in England in the few years preceding 1914.
Their campaign seemed to be founded in insanity, and yet something of
the kind was necessary to concentrate the world's attention on their
rights, and the Bolsheviks have got the world's attention and thought
to-day--and will have them to-morrow.
Socialism is adverse to imperialism and capitalism. Imperialism has been
conquered, but capitalism has not yet been throttled. One will be able
more safely to prophesy how much it has been weakened, potentially and
actually, after labor has had its next chance at the bat in Great
Britain. This war was not undertaken to overcome capitalism. It was
undertaken to overcome imperialism and the tyranny of foreign
domination, but its success has been dependent upon the people, who will
now assert their rights, and the most fundamental of their rights is
that they shall not be oppressed by money. It is not sufficient that the
principles of nationality defined by Mazzini shall be upheld--that is,
that the peoples of one nationality shall not be dominated by the
peoples of another. It is necessary, if such peoples are going to live
in freedom, that they must not be dominated or enslaved by any
mastodonic power which is protected from attack, such as capital. Had it
not been for the determination of the people to have the right to live
in freedom, the miracle that transpired in the closing months of 1918 in
Europe would not have been wrought. The factors that sustained the
peoples of the conquering nations in these long, dark months of tragedy
and of carnage, the thing that made them go on stubbornly and
steadfastly with the war when the odds seemed to be all against them,
may be summarized in one sentence: "Their determination to have their
inalienable right, the right to live in freedom." One may perhaps say
that in different countries of the world they have had such right, but
the person who says this would have great difficulty in naming the
country. Any one who contended that in republics such as ours capital
has not been privileged and arbitrary, that it has not been the dominant
factor in making and adopting the laws to which the people are beholden,
would be laughed at by any sane man.
And now that the people who have lived and died, toiled and wrought,
suffered and supplicated through fifty-two months of agony have won,
there will arise from those who have survived a dominant chorus which
will insist upon the fulfilment of the promises that were made them to
incite them to victory. Their hopes and desires and aspirations must be
satisfied. I am one of those who believe that they will make their
demands orderly and insistently, and not by means of revolution or
serious disturbance of order. They will work out their salvation by
mutual co-operation, not only amongst themselves but with those who are
the leaders of the world's thought, many of whom have been heretofore of
the privileged classes, but they will insist upon certain fundamental
things which I have previously enumerated, and the foremost of which is
the dispersion of great wealth, particularly hereditary wealth. The
revolutionary Socialist sees an easy solution of the matter in the
giving of the wealth to the masses and of recognizing no other source of
wealth except labor, but that is not the kind of Socialist who will have
to do with the reordering of the world that is now being born. It is the
Socialist who is to-day frequently called the individualist, who
believes that the dissipation of individual property and initiative will
spell a greater ruin for the masses than for the individual and who
believes in harmonizing the principles of individual liberty with those
of solidarity, who will be the Socialist of the New Era.
The future state will be arbitrary only in so far as it is the
expression of the collected, united force of its citizens. They will
really make its laws, not have them made for them by capital or
privileged interests; they will enforce them impartially, and it is
devoutly to be hoped the external force of such peoples will be
conventionized in such a way with other peoples that armies and navies
will practically cease to exist. The basis of such hope is in the League
of Nations, for then we shall have a world-state which shall make
international law or convention subject to law and enforcement. Once the
fear of invasion of a country is overcome and once the principles of
nationality can be established and put into operation, there will be no
reason for the existence of armies and navies.
The beneficences subsumed under the name liberty that must flow from the
sacrifices that we have made for the welfare of the people must assure
their health, contribute to their happiness, and promote their
efficiency. Disease must be prevented, not by personal effort as on the
part of physicians who do it for gain or fame, but by the state, which
shall devote adequate sums for research, investigation, propaganda, and
enforcement of the principles of sanitation. It shall likewise devote
adequate sums for the education of all the people and thrust such
education upon them in order that they may make use, not only for
themselves but for the state, of the talents with which they have been
endowed, so that liberty and personal initiative may be made running
mates, and no closely knit organization as the church shall be permitted
to stand in the way of such education. It shall permit them to worship
God as they, educated, see fit and proper, and it shall not attempt, or
tolerate the attempt of others, to thrust a religion founded in
authority upon them, non-conformation to which is followed by
punishment, often in condign form, such as social ostracism, refusal of
the ministration of paid priests, refusal of burial in consecrated
grounds, or threat of punishment. It shall not enforce upon them a
conduct at variance with the laws of nature in sex relations; therefore,
it shall solve the marriage and population questions, or at least make
an attempt to do so. It shall give the same freedom to woman as it does
to man and not have one written or unwritten law for the former and
another for the latter. It shall replace our present economic system by
a better one; in other words, money must be given a new valuation.
When everything has been said, the state is the thing. What constitutes
a state or a nation? We know what has constituted it in the past, but
when we read history we realize that it has never been stable, always
has been in transformation. Some have been more stable than
others--England more than Italy, France more than Austria, the United
States more than France. When a nation does not change it is dead like
Spain, strangled by the parasite, arbitrary authority, the church.
A new order of state-formation is about to be instituted--that of
nationalism. Comparatively few people appreciate what is meant by
nationalism. Until the wide-spread discussion of the aspirations of the
Czecho-Slovaks in America, I doubt whether any one, except students of
history and statesmen, gave any attention to it whatsoever. And yet,
despite this, no one has elaborated the fundamental facts of nationality
as clearly as has President Wilson. Nearly a third of all the peoples of
Europe have been obliged to submit to governments to which they were
antipathic by birth, sympathy, or tradition. In other words, Italians
living beyond a certain arbitrary geographic line have been obliged to
subscribe to the laws of Austria; French living beyond a certain
geographic line have been obliged to subscribe to the laws of Germany;
Slavs to those of Hungary. Patriotism, that indefinable quality made up
of primitive instincts, intellectual convictions, and religious feeling,
which is supposed to be the greatest of all the virtues, has been an
artifice for a third of all the peoples of the European continent. If
they were really patriotic, their hearts and minds were with their
mother countries, and therefore their conduct toward the ruler to which
they bowed the knee must have been that of the hypocrite. One of the
things on which all the Allied nations are agreed is that in the
remaking of the map of Europe every man shall be free to elect his
nationality and that no one shall be coerced to be a citizen of another
nation. He may elect to be a citizen of another nation, but that is his
concern.
It is more than probable that there will be very great difficulty in
rearranging the map of Europe satisfactorily in order that this
principle of nationality may be fulfilled, and nowhere will it be so
difficult as in Italy. The agreement of Italy with the Allies previous
to her entering the war, and which is known as the Pact of London, gave
her, in event of victory, large sections of the Dalmatian coast of which
she has great need in order to facilitate the development of her
commerce and to provide her with certain essentials which her territory
does not furnish. This Dalmatian coast and the territory contiguous to
it to the east--Istria, Croatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina--are not
populated by Italians to any considerable extent. As a matter of fact,
the vast majority of the people are Slavs, and it is this country which
many people believe and hope will eventually become Jugoslavia. There is
no doubt whatsoever that Italy will get all her unredeemed territory,
but whether or not she will get much more than that on the continent of
Europe is doubtful in the minds of many, including her well-wishers.
The question of nationality is not going to be an easy one for
Austria-Hungary to settle. In reality, German-Austria constitutes an
important hinge upon which all the problems that are connected with the
reconstruction of Central Europe swing. Aside from the Czecho-Slovak
nation, which is Bohemia and the territories that were lopped off from
it previous to the time when it was absorbed by Austria-Germany, the
smaller nations that have come to the surface and have been
differentiated in this waterspout that has disturbed the waters of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire will have to wait a long time for their rights
and differentiation, but the status of German Austria will have to be
settled very promptly. It has been said repeatedly in the newspapers
that these people have expressed a desire to unite themselves with a
German confederation, probably Bavaria. A great many people see in this
accession to Germany of ten or twelve millions of people a potential
menace in so far as this added number might make for a disturbance of
the equilibrium of power. But one cannot say whether or not this fear is
groundless until we see what form of government Prussia and Bavaria and
the other states of Germany are eventually going to have. If the
principles of nationality are not going to be invalidated by any future
settlements, the Germans of Austria would have only two choices--to
constitute an independent government of their own or to link themselves
with one of the Prussian states. As a matter of fact, it is most
unlikely that the Allies will attempt to give them any advice in this
matter, which means they will not attempt to direct or coerce them.
France may not have an easy time with Alsace-Lorraine. In the two
generations that have elapsed since Germany took them, it is not at all
unlikely that many of their people have become a part of the national
consciousness of that country. The just way would be to let the adults
of Alsace-Lorraine decide at the end of another forty-eight years,
during which time it is united to France, by universal vote of its
adults, men and women, whether they want to have French or German
nationality. I should think France would be taking no risks in such a
plebiscite.
England will have Ireland to deal with after the war even more than
before the war. There is only one way that she can do it successfully
and that is on the principles of nationality. The Irish are no more like
the English than the Czechs are like the Austrians; in fact, they are
less so. They are different emotionally, intellectually, morally, and
physically, and England will not much longer be allowed to coerce them.
Her one privilege in Ireland is to force universal education upon her
people. If this had been done before, England would have long ere this
brought about that instinctive liking and common purpose which is the
basis of all sound union, whether it be between individuals or between
components of a nation.
Italy's chief difficulty is going to be with the Jugoslavs, as the
southern Slavs are called, and already these difficulties have begun.
The southern Slavs have not, so far as I can learn, formulated a
definite programme, and they were never recognized as belligerent allies
by the Entente. Italy had a hesitating recognition of southern Slav
aspirations forced from her, but there is no trust or confidence reposed
in the Slavs by the Italians. The Croatians, the Bosnians, the
Montenegrins, the Albanians do not know what they want, save change, and
that they have wanted since time immemorial. They have no specific
programme and there is no definite interlacement of their desires with
Serbia. So far as their plans can be gleaned, realization of them, even
in the most fundamental one of establishing a plebiscitary area, would
find itself in violent conflict with Italy's pre-bellum agreement with
the Allies known as the Treaty of London.
All things come to him who waits. If while waiting things do not come to
us that make life forever after unlivable, we shall be fortunate, and
forever grateful.
November, 1918.