Walker, "Focal depth and the Time Curve," Brit. Assn. Rep. (1917. p 13). C. G. Knott, " The Propagation of Earthquake Waves Through the Earth, and Connected Problems," Proc. Roy. Soc. Edin- burgh (1919, p. 157)- ( R - D - O; )
SEITZ, KARL (1869- ), Austrian politician, was born at Vienna on Sept. 4 1869, the son of a wood merchant. Left without parents at an early age, he grew up in an orphanage, and, after
completing his course in the public elementary school, began to
learn the tailoring trade, until through the medium of patrons he
was provided with a place in the teachers' seminary at St. Pb'lten.
In this way he became an elementary school teacher. Originally
inclined to the German National party, he joined in 1888 the So-
cial Democratic party. He organized the Social Democratic
teachers of Vienna, and in the Diet of Lower Austria waged a fierce
fight against Burgomaster Lueger and the dominant Christian
Socialist party. Elected to the Austrian Reichsrat in 1901, he be-
came, after the death of Pernerstorfer, its vice-president down to
its dissolution. After the revolution of 1918 he was president of
the German-Austrian National Assembly, and subsequently of the
national parliament (Nationalrat) until the new elections in Oct.
1920, and federal president until Nov. 1920. He was in 1921 chair-
man of the committee of the Social Democratic party and of the
parliamentary party, and vice-president of the Nationalrat.
SELBORNE, WILLIAM WALDEGRAVE PALMER, 2ND EARL OF
(1859- ), English politician (see 24.599), on his return from the governorship of South Africa resumed his prominent position in the House of Lords. He took an active share in defending
the House against Liberal attack, and was one of the leading
" Die-hards " who maintained an uncompromising resistance to
the Parliament bill. In regard to Irish Home Rule, he constantly
pressed for a referendum to the people. As a former First Lord
of the Admiralty, he contributed decisively to the condemnation
passed by the House on the Declaration of London. When the
World War came he was largely occupied with his military du-
ties with the 3rd Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment; but he
joined the first Coalition Ministry as Minister of Agriculture
and Fisheries. As minister he appointed a committee of technical
experts and practical agriculturists, under the chairmanship of
Lord Milner, to report on the means of maintaining and increas-
ing food production in England and Wales; but, fortified by the
opinion of a Scottish committee appointed for the same purpose,
he and the Government rejected the English committee's recom-
mendation to guarantee farmers a minimum price of 453. a
quarter for the four years following the harvest of 1916. He
preferred a plan for organization and cooperation through the
county councils and the Board of Agriculture. In June of the
following year he resigned his office because he disapproved of
the Irish policy accepted by Mr. Asquith's Government as a
result of Mr. Lloyd George's negotiations with Irish leaders.
He did not join Mr. Lloyd George's Ministry, and after the war
he was mainly conspicuous in ecclesiastical matters; he was
forward in promoting the movement for self-government in the
Church which culminated in the Church Enabling Act of 1919.
His elder son, ROUNDELL, CECIL, VISCT. WOLMER (b. 1887), en-
tered Parliament in 1910, and proved an active member of
the Unionist party. A younger son was killed in the war.
SELF-DETERMINATION. This phrase, defined in the Oxford New English Dictionary as " the determination of one's mind or
will by itself towards an object," was used exclusively, from the
1 7th century to within quite recent years, as a synonym for
" free will " in the individual person, as opposed to the deter-
mination of this will by God's predestination the doctrine of
Determinism. Thus John Scott, in his Christian Life (1683-6),
speaks of " necessary agents, that have no Free-will or Principle
of Self-determination," and Bishop Stillingfleet, in his Origines
Sacrae (1662), of giving man " the freedom of his actions, and a
self-determining power." The New English Dictionary fails to
show any use of the phrase in earlier days in the sense in which
it became widespread and familiar at the close of the World War,
and it has been commonly assumed that it was a new word
coined, or rather adapted from the Russian Samo-obrazhenie, to
give convenient expression to the political principle for which
the nations of the Entente were then supposed to be fighting, that is to say, the right of nations to determine their own alle- giance and form of government. It had, however, been used in this sense even before the war. Thus in his article on ROME in the earlier volumes (nth edition) of this Encyclopaedia (a recension of the gth edition article by Prof. H. F. Pelham) Prof. H. Stuart Jones, writing of the Roman provincial government, says that " nothing could compensate for the lack of self-deter- mination " (see 23.653).
It was after the Revolution of March 1917 in Russia that self-determination " as a political catch-word came into sud- den prominence. On April 10 the Russian Government, then dominated by the Radical element under Kerensky, issued a statement which said, among other things, that " Free Russia does not aim at dominating other nations; .... its object is to establish a durable peace on the basis of the rights of nations to decide their own destiny." The substance of this proclamation was at once condensed into the formula " self- determination, no annexations, no indemnities," which was to produce so profound, and in some ways so disastrous, an influence on the world-settlement which followed the war. The principle of self-determination had, indeed, already been laid down by President Wilson in his address to Congress of Jan. 22 1917. No peace can last," he said, " or ought to last, which does not recognize and accept the principle that Governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed." The prin- ciple, and the words in which it is defined, are those of the American Declaration of Independence; it was not till a year later that President Wilson himself crystallized this principle in the word " self-determination " in the address to Congress of Feb. ii 1918, in which he defined the Fourteen Points; and on this occasion the phrase is still marked as a neologism by being printed between inverted commas. " ' Self-determination ' is not a mere phrase," he said; " it is an imperative principle of action which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril." Two months later, in his speech of April 6, the phrase had become, as it were, naturalized; he speaks of " the free self-determination of nations upon which all the modern world insists." The inverted commas no longer appear.
President Wilson has been blamed in certain quarters for his failure at the Peace Conference in 1919 to make the principle of self-determination the only basis of the ultimate settlement, for allowing the old diplomatic Adam too much say in the adjustment of national boundaries. In this respect the blame is not deserved; for he had early pointed out that the application of the principle must be conditional; the fourth of the "Four Principles" laid down in his speech of Feb. n 1918 was "that all well-defined national aspirations shall be accorded the utmost satisfaction that can be accorded them without introducing new or perpetuating old elements of discord and antagonism that would be likely to break the peace of Europe and consequently the world." This is, of course, a serious limitation of the principle of self-determination in its practical application, since it involves a check upon this determination by an outside authority, which authority President Wilson defined as " the organized force of mankind "embodied in the League of Nations but which in effect has been, and always must be, those nations that are in a position to make their will prevail, whether inside or outside the League. In practice, then, self-determination has proved largely illusory. The Treaty of Versailles made advances towards the application of the principle, but these advances were tentative and timid. No transferences of territory of the first importance such as those of Alsace-Lorraine to France or of Posen and West Prussia to Poland were made subject to plebiscites. In the treaty with Germany plebiscites were prescribed in the cases of the districts of Allenstein and Marienwerder, of Upper Silesia and of North Schleswig, and negative plebiscites in the case of Eupen and Malmedy. In the Austrian treaty plebiscites were prescribed in the cases of Klagenfurt and Teschen, but it was only in the former case that a popular vote was actually taken. A plebiscite was refused in the case of Western Hungary, transferred to the Republic of Austria under
