The Czechoslovak Review/Volume 2/Cannon Barry on the Austrian Problem

Cannon Barry on the Austrian Problem.

America’s interest in foreign affairs is of recent date. That is the reason why our magazines, both those that sell for 15 cents and those costing 35 cents, seldom contain articles on international questions of such interest and authority as are found in every issue of noted London reviews as the Nineteenth Century, the Contemporary Review, the Fortnightly Review or the New Europe. Articles on foreign topics in our most serious monthlies are elementary in character and are generally written in a popular vein by men whose acquaintance with the subject is seldom of long standing. The English reviews have contributors who are experts in their subject and who write for readers familiar with the general situation in the country under discussion.

The best analysis of the problem of Austria-Hungary from the point of view of England, and that means America as well, will be found in the November issue of the Nineteenth Century. The author is Cannon William Barry, and the article in question is his second essay on the same subject. His first discussion appeared in the September issue of the Nineteenth Century under the title “Break Austria.” Great deal of interest and debate was stirred up by the first article, so that Cannon Barry decided to supplement his original argument by a second contribution, entitled “How to Break Austria.” Dr. Barry is a well-known Roman Catholic theologian, as well as an essayist and novelist. He lived in Rome for many years, knows the principal European languages and has been interested in foreign politics for nearly fifty years. When one remembers that the Austrian Empire has been looked upon by the Catholic Church as the only Great Power faithful to the Church, it is remarkable to find a Catholic scholar advocating the destruction of Austria.

Dr. Barry’s arguments are put together with the skill of a gifted man of letters and the wisdom of an experienced man of affairs. We quote at length:

“If the defeat of Germany is the military problem, the dissolution of Austria remains the head and front of the political problem.

“There was a widespread anticipation, almost reaching the height of prophecy, that whenever the Emperor-King Francis Joseph should die, the Austrian Empire would be no more—like the baseless fabric for a vision it would vanish. The prophets, their gaze fixed on a lonely figure, the Fate of the Hofburg, so to speak, were oblivious as prophets often have been of that which lay beyond the stage and behind the scenes. Francis Joseph would never have kept this great bundle of hissing snakes together himself. He was no magician. The snake-charmer was, first of all, Bismark. I confine my view to the treaty of Nikolsburg in 1866 which is the fountainhead of European war and peace down to our own day. Bismarck, a political genius of the highest rank, had not only beaten Austria, he had subdued her. She lost at his bidding her very self. She was henceforth, in the strict sense of the word, hypnotized. And like the victim of that pernicious influence, she could do nothing except as she was bidden. The ‘old and haughty nation, proud in arms,’ disappeared, to leave room for a vassal most obedient to the word and command of Potsdam. This utter and complete transformation of a great European Power, always in time past friendly to England, has never yet made itself a palpable determining fact to our Foreign Office. Never, I say. The proof lies at hand, unfortunately too near, and with blood and tears and treasure we are paying its price. In those lamentable days of July 1914, to whom did Sir Edward Grey direct his letters of fateful issue, on the supposition that there must be a decision sought? To the Chancery of Vienna. Since Vienna had flung its ultimatum to Belgrade, surely the party to be convinced was Austria. The Kaiser, I think, laughed. He knew where the thunder came from. The master-magician had thrown Austria-Hungary into a trance with taking dreams of supremacy in the Balkans. What he intended was the German idea realized—Middle-Europe, Berlin to Bagdad, the British Empire cut through at the centre. But Sir Edward Grey treated Austria-Hungary as though she were the principal and Germany a dispassionate neutral. There was no Austria; nothing but a spell-bound subject of commands which dictated as a foregone conclusion that now the hour had struck for war, unless by its mere shadow the spoils of war could be secured.

“Therefore let Francis Joseph die when he might, the Austrian Empire was clamped together with hoops of German steel. Did the Slavs, Italians of the Trentino, Roumanians of the Bukovina, break out in revolt, German forces would have smitten them back into servitude, if the Imperial, Royal and Apostolic troops had fled before them. The Dual Monarchy was, and is at this day, simply a province of the German Empire. If it is anything else, what is it? I cannot discover that it does more, than like a beaten hound, whimper and behave as the whipper-in tells it. With strong insistence, and surely as a British subject in duty bound, I put it to the English friends of Austria, that they are required to show in what sphere of diplomacy or war the Dual Empire has not been governed by its German master. Since the disasters of those early campaigns have not Teutonic generals swept aside the native, planned the marchings and fightings, handled Austrian battalions as their own? And was not Herr von Tchirsky the real author of the war by his action during the so-called negotiations with unlucky Serbia?”

There are still men in America, as well as in England, who urge a considerate treatment for the Austrian government on the ground that Austria-Hungary may yet be detached from Germany and conclude a separate peace with the Allies. They imagine that the tranformation of Austria from a belligerent into a neutral would be a tremendous blow to Germany. The fact is that since Russia has ceased to be a danger to Germay, Kaiser Wilhelm would find it to his advantage to permit Emperor Charles to make a peace that would leave the Dual Empire practically unimpaired. Dr. Barry’s argument on this point is very striking and convincing and should be carefully read and pondered by the statesmen of America and England both. He says:

“But some among us are pleading that we should ‘detach’ the Dual Empire from Kaiserdom by offering it a separate peace. Do these well-intentioned persons, mostly of the class in which diplomatists are bred, consider what their proposals would bring about the moment that such a treaty was signed? War having languished into a long truce or its equivalent on the Russian front, it would cease altogether on the Roumanian, Serbian and Italian. Austria would send to the West all those German officers and divisions now employed in stiffening her own unsteady troops. As they retired, parks of Austrian artilery with ammunition corresponding would follow. Thanks to our touching memories of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ we should have liberated the Kaiser from a grave anxiety, increased his armies and doubled the risk to our own. That is not all, probably not the worst. We should have put in commission for the German benefit some fifty million of workers who would transform Austria making it the granary and the armory of the Fatherland—fields, mines, manufactures, transport service. And how could the Western Allies forbid that which they were unable to prevent? We have looked on helplessly while neutral Holland was feeding and arming the Teuton hosts, all in the way of trade. Imagine the relief to beleagured Germany that a neutral Austria would afford. So timely, and soon so abundant, would it prove that we may perhaps be startled, ere many months are gone, by hearing from good sources of the Wilhemstrasse urging a ‘separate peace’ on its friends of the Ballplatz, just as under different circumstances it prescribed and insisted on the ultimatum to Serbia. No, ‘detachment’ is not the word for us when we are dealing with Mr. Facing-Both-Ways, treacherous at once and insidious, who would affect to be England’s reconciled comrade while he was Prussia’s tool. We cannot, I hope, have reached that degree of infatuation at which we would guarantee the vast resources of Austria-Hungary to von Hinderburg’s use under the deluding name of ‘neutrality’. We do not want any more neutrals.”

Cannon Barry does not look with favor upon schemes of federalized Austria. The royal word of the Hapsburgs does not seem to him to be much of a guarantee; he prefers to trust the small nations that are to arise out of the ruins of the Hapsburg empire, their love of liberty, their fear of German aggression. “Quite conceivably the Emperor Karl would consent to be crowned in Prague with the crown of Saint Venceslas, and in Agram as king of the Croats and Slovenes; he would give them their several parliaments with ministers responsible to the majority. But that is all stage-play. When the curtain fell and the business of government was taken in hand, does any politician or diplomatist believe that such crowned Federalism would be aught else than organized hypocrisy? Let us clear our minds of cant, even when we hear it snuffling in pious tones its reminiscences of chivalrous Austrians and constitutional Magyars. We are fighting for our lives, nay, for the liberties and happiness of generations yet to be, for the British Empire and the true culture which we have inherited from classic antiquity, for the Christian Church of old, and emphatically, for the civilized West, which now embraces America. What lot or portion have the Hohenzollerns and their subject Hapsburgs in defending this our human estate? None; they are bent on laying it waste. Break them, I say, and bind them close by setting free, by making strong the peoples round about, on whose toil and serfdom they have thriven. Parchment is only sheepskin; but a valiant little nation, give it power to manage itself, will show what the spirit can do, be the odds ever so tremendous—and here let us recite, honoris causa, the names of Belgium, Serbia, Montenegro, Roumania. There are nations besides them, waiting till the day of deliverance dawns, in the front rank Bohemia and Poland. But the pioneer, from a past of well-nigh twenty-seven centuries, the mother of Latin and medieval civilization, is Italy. Have we made up our minds that we will save Austria, enslave Poland, leave Bohemia to be tortured without hope, and refuse to see in Italy her predestined mission as vanguard and herald of the Western Allies? For we too must choose, and our choice falls within a narrow field. From the Baltic to the Adriatic, there stretches a belt of captive and very unhappy nations or tribes whom we can release, make our devoted friends and bring into the West, far off as they seem to dwell. These wait to become gladly our moral conquest, to learn of us the better things we know, and forever to set bounds that the German barbarians shall not pass over.”

Magyars in the United States try to create the impression that theirs is one of the nations oppressed by Austria and that their sympathies are not on the German side. Cannon Barry knows that the facts are far different. “Do we realize how closely the small ruling nation of the Magyars depends on Germany for its paramount position in the midst of a great Slav ring of subject peoples? Yet so it is and must be, though Hungarians hate and look down upon the Prussians without whose backing their own supremacy would vanish. Again, if we turn to Austria proper, what do we find? I quote an authoritative statement to the following effect: In the beginning of February, 1917, two powerful parties which before the war had ruled this portion of the Empire alternately, the National Union who are Liberals, and the Christian Socialists came to an understanding. The Liberals were led by Jews and anti-Clericals, the Christian Socialists by Clericals and anti-Semites. But they now passed resolutions in favor of a customs union between Austria and Germany, they agreed that German should be the sole official language, and that all Germans resident in Austria, though not its subjects, should be reckoned as Austrian citizens. And these are the chief political forces in the western half of the Dual Empire. Thus our sum in addition is quickly done, like Portia’s declaration of love in The Merchant of Venice, “one-half of me is yours, the other half yours”. Not a legion of Counts Karolyi will persuade us that the Hungarians think of sacrificing their tyranny over Slavs and Rumanes to a platonic affection for Old England. If the Kaiser falls, the Magyar dominion collapses at the same instant. And when Jews agree with anti-Semites to Germanize what exists of Austria not owned by the Hungarians, we may well exclaim: ‘These be wonders’, ‘Vidimus mirabilia hodie’.”

The author is well acquainted with the sufferings of the Bohemian people during the war and with the persecutions and massacres perpetrated upon them by Vienna. And of course he is a warm advocate of Bohemian independence. “The whole chapter of Bohemia during these melancholy years is like the prophet’s scroll most lamentable, but yet it is glorious for a people who, cut off from help and sympathy, are struggling in a silent martyrdom that the Allies may win. This cultivated, peace-loving and constantly heroic branch of the Western Slavs should be dear to England on many accounts. But as political inducements let me add Bismarck’s saying: ‘He that holds Bohemia is master of Europe’, and the simple fact of geography that such a mountain land in the center of a continent, were it free and confederate with its kinsfolk to the East, would be like a wedge thrust into the heart of Pan-Germanism; it would split that entire system across, and thereby end the peril now threatening our Indian Empire.”

It is not practicable to quote Cannon Barry at length on the disposition he proposes to make of the various countries ruled by the Hapsburgs. But his conclusion presents a powerful argument in favor of the radical treatment of the Austrian problem.

“Our policy is large and simple. The English-speaking west, the Latin nations, the Slavs of the center, have an interest in common. Its name is freedom; its enemy is Germanism. In the light of this commanding philosophy we cannot afford to be jealous or partisan or disunited. Our danger from the military menace of the Prussian Kaiser is not now formidable, in comparison of what it was even two years ago. We are conquering and to conquer. But we might win in the field and be worsted at the council board; we have to ask our selves again and again: Is a German peace possible? Will her political victory follow her military collapse? It has been thought more than probable, since the Allies can prevent it only by setting about a total reconstruction of the Near East, in other words, by breaking Austria, settling the Balkan problem on a just foundation, reconciling the different, if not diverse claims of Poles, Letts, Ruthenes, Czechs, Slovaks and Jugoslavs with each other, and all under Western guidance of which the interpreter will, in the main, be a Greater Italy. To leave Austria-Hungary still paramount, under federal conditions, is apparently the line of least resistance, always favored by diplomacy. Perhaps it is, but without any perhaps it would make the Kaiser the lord of Europe.

“The better but surer way is to bridle the Hohenzollerns by a ring of independent nations around them; to combine Antwerp with Dantzig, Trieste with Saloniki, creating a naval quadrilateral, under the protection of which the new democratic states might live in security, and be at all times federated among themselves, with the Allies and with America. This treaty the sword alone can write; but its terms shall be dictated by the wisdom learnt in the suffering of those down-trodden peoples who knew what Germanism has done in the past and who dread its dominion in the world which it has failed to subdue, but which it is yet capable of beguiling into a peace more inhuman than war itself. Absit omen.”