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the war. The financial situation of Austria-Hungary is very precarious; the war has cost the country an enormous amount of money, and the Austro-Hungarian bank has been degraded into an institute for false coining.[1]
Independent Bohemia would have to begin her own administration with a considerable financial burden; and the leading political men of Bohemia are well aware of their serious task, and of the necessity for a solid, thoroughly balanced financial administration. It may be mentioned that after the war the financial exhaustion of all the nations will necessitate the most stringent financial administration; but it may be said, without exaggeration, that Bohemia will have excellent administrators in all departments of public and private service, who will be quite fit for the work of remodelling the State.[2]
In this outline it is impossible to discuss all the social and economic problems of Bohemia. But it is of general interest to point out the peculiar position of the Bohemian landed proprietors (aristocracy), which is very similar to that of the famous East Elbian Junkers. As in East Prussia the Germans confiscated the soil of the Slavs, so did Austria and her aristocratic accomplices in Bohemia after the battle of the White Mountain. It was as a result of these and former robberies that, in Bohemia, landed estates were created of a size equal to some of the small German States. These proprietors, for the most part, are Austrian in sentiment, and would, perhaps, form a dangerous element. Bohemia, might, in that case, follow the methods of land purchase and parcelling adopted in Ireland, as, indeed, all the Liberal parties demanded before the war.
The Czecho-Slovak State will undoubtedly be a republic.
This very war revealed sufficiently the reactionary and dangerous character of continental monarchism; the Czecho-Slovak nation is ripe for a republic. In the course of centuries we became accustomed to living without kings of our own; the Habsburgs were to us always foreigners; the aristocracy also became estranged from the nation and attached itself closely to the foreign dynasty. The aristocracy in Bosnia-Herzegovina became Turkish and in Bohemia Habsburg.[3]
The independence of the Czecho-Slovak State is a demand of political justice, by its geographical location in the centre of Europe and by its century-long struggle against the German “Push toward the East,” the Czech and Slovak nation is the anti-German vanguard of all the nations in Eastern Europe. Should the Czech-Slovak nation remain in the sway of the Germans and Asiatic peoples allied with Germans, Magyars and Turks, and should it actually fall, Pangerman Central Europe and its further political consequences will be realised. The Czecho-Slovak question is a world question and is the problem of this very war; free Bohemia, or reactionary Austria, the free Czecho-Slovak nation or the degenerate Habsburgs—that is the choice for Europe and America, for the thinking Europe and America.
Her geographical position in the centre of Europe, and her historical antoganism to oppressive Germanism and Pangermanism secures to Bohemia that great political significance recognised since by the Allies; and it is in the interest of the Allies to liberate Bohemia if Prussian militarism and German lust to domination are to be crushed and the Pangerman plan of Berlin–Cairo and Berlin–Bagdad are to be frustrated. The Allies’ plan, like that of the enemy, is a far-reaching programme. The war and its consequences is the greatest event in human history.
- ↑ The bank since the beginning of 1917 has not published its gold account.
- ↑ Bohemia would introduce the franc currency, which combines the Latin and the Russian currency: 20 francs = 712 roubles (40=15).
- ↑ Count Czernin, in one of his memoranda submitted to Francis Ferdinand, charges the Czechs with having the least sentiment for the dynasty. We gladly record this denunciation of this nobleman of Bohemia and Bohemian descent, who years ago publicly declared himself to be a German.
