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Poland, and President Wilson himself has clearly realised that Germany, controlling Austria-Hungary and through it the Balkans and Turkey, would carry out the Pangerman plan, Berlin–Bagdad; and that the whole world thereby would be disturbed and peace made impossible.[1] That Austria-Hungary is a mere vassal of Berlin, President Wilson made clear in the same address in which he spoke of its integrity; and if he ever imagined that Austria would attempt to get rid of its vassalage, he had given up this idea—Austria accepts this vassalage evermore.
President Wilson did not hesitate to change his XIV. peace terms. The government of the United States following France, Italy and Great Britain, recognised the Czecho-Slovaks as a belligerent nation and their National Council as the de facto government invested with the highest authority in the military and political matters of the Czecho-Slovaks: and in his answer to Austria-Hungary he emphasized this change of his XIV. terms and advised Austria-Hungary to negotiate with the Czecho-Slovaks and Jugoslavs. In a letter answering a direct question, President Wilson explained as to his III. term, that it does not mean free trade—no doubt, the XIV. peace terms express only general principles allowing more concrete and final definitions and alterations; just as the terms of the Allies at the deciding peace conference will be defined and changed.
9. The Allies and President Wilson did not offer a political plan elaborated in all details—the chief point of his proposal consists in a firm declaration for a democratic political programme.
Between the policy of the Allies and the Central Powers there is a difference of opinion.
The Allies are democratic and republican states which derive the right of government from the will of the people; they are states that arose out of the revolution; France, the country of the Great Revolution and of the Declaration of the Rights of Man; England, the pattern of the parliamentary régime with royalty subordinated to the rule of the majority; Italy, anti-papal, fighting for the unification of the nation, also accepts Parliamentary principles; old Russia did not fit into this alliance, but she cast down the Tsarism and now strives for a republic, i.e., a social republic; the United States, the first great democracy and republic, which organised political liberty on the basis of ecclesiastical and religious freedom and which served as an example to revolutionary France and to European democracy in general.
The Allies have been joined by other republican and democratic states. The neutral states are to a large extent on the side of the Allies; in Norway, Denmark—even in Sweden and Switzerland—a considerable part of the democracy accepts the principles of the Allies.
As against them, Central Europe is composed of monarchical and militaristic states; this monarchism is in substance mediæval, theocratic; Prussia-Germany, with her idea of Prussian Kingship by God’s grace renewed the mediæval empire; Austria-Hungary, an altogether artificial state, held together by the dynasty and the army, anti-democratic, anti-national, clerical, jesuitical, like Prussia sticks to the idea of the mediæval empire. Both states oppose to the will of the people the fiction of divine will, and pretend to be its heralds. Turkey, mediæval, and in addition uncivilised, barbarous; Bulgaria, led by an Austro-German parvenu, who finds every means fair, fits well in the society of the Hohenzollerns and Hapsburgs. The Roman pontifex since long ago led by Jesuitism, works for Austria and Prussia; Austria is the last great Catholic state, and William’s Lutheran Germany, in order to hold Austria, sacrifices to Rome and the Catholic Centre her Protestant leadership. Jesuitism, Machiavellianism are the politics and diplomacy of papal Rome, Prussia and Austria
- ↑ President Wilson in his address to the Convention of the Federation of Labor at Buffalo, November 12, 1917.
