The object of this volume is to make Bohemia and her people better
known to the English-speaking world. The average Englishman’s and
American’s knowledge of Bohemia is very vague. It is only within
recent years that Anglo-American writers have begun to take a deeper
interest in her people. Among the more prominent students of Bohemian
contemporary life should be mentioned: Will S. Monroe, Emily G.
Balch, and Herbert Adolphus Miller, in the United States; and A. R.
Colquhoun, Richard J. Kelly, F. P. Marchant, James Baker, Wickham H.
Steed, Charles Edmund Maurice, W. R. Morfill, and R. W. Seton-Watson
in England. Count Lützow has written in English a number of works on
Bohemian matters.
While it is yet too early to foresee the precise results of the Great
War, one may judge of coming events by the shadows they cast before
them. A close observer of the Austrian shadows is justified in thinking
that the Bohemian people, so long suppressed, stand on the threshold
of a new destiny. This destiny points to the restoration of their
ancient freedom. If the Allies win--and every loyal son of the Land
of Hus fervently wishes that their arms might prevail, notwithstanding
the fact that Bohemian soldiers are constrained to fight for the cause
of the two Kaisers--Bohemia is certain to re-enter the family of
self-governing European nations. The proclamation which the Russian
Generalissimo addressed to the Poles may be said to apply with equal
force to the Bohemians: “The hour has sounded when the sacred dream of
your fathers may be realized.... Bohemia will be born again, free in
her religion, her language, and autonomous.... The dawn of a new life
begins for you.... In this glorious dawn is seen the sign of the cross,
the symbol of suffering and the resurrection of a people.”
At the close of the Franco-Prussian War, Frenchmen erected in the
Place de la Concorde in Paris the Statue of Strassburg, which they
have kept draped, as a sign of mourning for the loss of their beloved
Alsace-Lorraine. The Bohemians have grieved for their motherland much
longer than the French for the “Lost Provinces.” Bohemia put on her
mourning garb in 1620, the year her rebel army was defeated by the
imperialist troops of Ferdinand II., at the Battle of White Mountain
near Prague, the capital of the kingdom. May it not be hoped that
the joyous moment is near when her sons can substitute for the black
and yellow of Austria the red and white of Bohemia--the colors that
Charles Havlíček loved so well. “My colors are red and white,” declared
this fearless patriot to his Austrian tormentors. “You can promise me,
you can threaten me, but a traitor I shall never be.”
Never during the three hundred years of Austrian misrule were
conditions so propitious for throwing off the shackles of oppression
as now. In the darkest hours of national humiliation, the children of
Hus and of Komenský (Comenius) did not despair. “We existed before
Austria,” Palacký used to tell them, “and we shall survive her.”
May not the words of the “Father of his Country,” as Palacký was
affectionately called by his countrymen, come true, in view of what is
taking place in the Hapsburg Monarchy to-day?
With what form of government would Bohemia make her re-entry into the
European family of nations--as a free state, as a dependency of Russia,
as a ward of the Allies, or incorporated in a federation of the states
remaining to the Hapsburg Empire?
It was a favorite theory of Palacký that the Austrian nations would,
for their own protection, have to create an Austria, if she were ever
destroyed. But what Palacký has said may no longer be true, because
the events of 1914 have created issues and opened up possibilities
undreamt of in his times. Palacký, let it be understood, had in mind a
Confederated Austria that should form a bulwark for small races against
German expansion from the north and the west.
It has been intimated that the Allies might agree to create Bohemia and
Hungary as independent buffer states to curb German aggression, just
as Belgium and Holland are buffer states between Germany and France.
If this war has shown anything, it has demonstrated the usefulness of
a small state like that of the Belgians. Albania, it will be recalled,
had been brought into being by Austria and Italy, not for humanitarian
reasons, we may be sure, but to menace and weaken Serbia, of whose
growth they were jealous.
Another probability is that Russia might demand, as one of the prizes
of war, the cession of the northern part of Austria-Hungary, which
is wholly Slavic. She might contend that she could not carry out her
traditional policy of guardianship of the Slavs, unless her kinsfolk
came under her influence, if not actually under her rule.
Francis Josef waged two wars in the past, both of which ended
disastrously for the empire. Yet from both of these wars good has come
to his subjects. The campaign in Italy, which resulted in the defeat of
the Austrians at Magenta and Solferino in 1859, dealt a severe blow
to the bureaucracy, liberating, incidentally, the Italians who were
trampled under foot by Radecky. As a result of the war with Prussia
in 1866, the Magyars came to their own. Hungarian autonomy dates from
1867. Now it is the turn of the Bohemians to profit from Austria’s
predicament.
Self-government is not only an ideal but a necessity to Bohemians. Why
should Bohemia, in addition to paying for her own needs, make good the
deficits of lands which are passive, and in whose domestic affairs she
has no greater interest than the State of New York has, for instance,
in the local constabulary of Nevada? Year after year Bohemians justly
complain that Vienna wrings millions in taxes from them that it spends
on lands that are passive. It is partly this feature of the case, the
high revenue flowing from the Bohemian Kingdom, which has made Vienna
hostile to the home rule agitation. Is it reasonable to suppose,
however, that if Austria could not wholly suppress the national
aspiration of Bohemians in times of peace, under normal conditions,
she is more likely to accomplish it if she returns home from the war
exhausted, humiliated, perchance vanquished?
It may seem hazardous to forecast Austria’s future in the event of the
Allies winning. But this much is already apparent, that the Austria of
1914, the government of which rested on the mediæval idea that one
white race was superior to another white race, is doomed to perish.
Austria needed a crushing blow from without, such as a lost war, to
send toppling the ramshackle structure that has menaced for so long
a time the security of the Slavic inhabitants. For, though rent by
internal discord, the monarchy obviously lacked forces powerful enough
to effect its own redemption. If the Teutonic forces are beaten, the
logical sequel will be the breakdown of the Germanic hegemony and a
corresponding rise of Slavism. With Poland resuscitated and Serbia
strengthened, Vienna, it is certain, will be powerless to hold the
Bohemians down.
But no matter what may happen, whether Austria-Hungary will remain
Hapsburg, whether the Allies will impose their will on her destiny, or
whether the Russians will become the masters of the North Slavs, let
us hope that the future map-makers will not be military conquerors, as
was the case at the Congress of Vienna in 1814, or statesmen of the
Bismarck type, who, at the Berlin Congress in 1878, were determined
to separate the people of one race, instead of uniting them. Let the
map-makers be ethnologists who will, wherever practicable, deliminate
boundaries according to racial, not political lines, giving German
territory to the Germans, Magyar territory to the people of that race,
Slavic lands to the Slavs.
Bohemia would not assume the serious task of self-government as an
inexperienced novice. Bohemia is one of the oldest states in Central
Europe. As a kingdom she antedates the German kingdoms, not excepting
Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria. Some of these were yet minor states when she
already played a conspicuous rôle in the affairs of Europe. In point
of population the United States of Bohemia--including Bohemia herself,
Moravia, Silesia, and Slovakland--would have within her borders a
population numbering about 12,000,000. The combined area of the three
first-named states is almost twice the size of Switzerland. Prague, the
capital, had in 1910 581,163 inhabitants. As a wealth-providing and
revenue-yielding country Bohemia stands unrivalled among the Hapsburg
States.