NOTES
The Austrian Germans and Bohemia.
In No. 67 we quoted at some length from Herr Austerlitz’s striking article on the Austrian Germans and their hopelessly local and bourgeois outlook. The Socialist editor’s views find confirmation in the following extract from the Prager Tagblatt (23 December), the organ of the German Jewish Radicals of Bohemia, which incidentally bears hostile witness (to those who are reluctant to face patent facts) as to the unanimity of Czech national feeling.
“The sad fact must be admitted that the German progressive parties have lost contact with the German people (in Austria). Each group coquettes with another company of irresponsible and discontented persons, but none thinks of the broad masses of the people on which alone a strong German policy can be built up. Among the Slavs, whether it be a question of the Czechs, Poles, Southern Slavs, or Ukrainians, the whole nation is rallied round and pledged to a definite idea, a programme, however bizarre it may be. For Czech policy there is in Vienna no difference between workmen and agrarians, between protectionists and freetraders; no, they have become a unified national mass, which has set its whole thought and effort upon the attainment of a definite aim. Every parliamentary action is considered, adopted or abandoned, solely with a view to a nearer approach to this aim. On the German side national policy, though so strongly emphasised, has never been able to overcome the “Regionalism” of the Sudetian [Bohemia, Moravia] and the Alpine Germans.”
President Wilson’s “must” and “should”
We have received from Mr. A. F. Giles, Lecturer in Ancient History at Edinburgh University, the following comment on President Wilson’s Message to Congress:—Mr. Wilson’s Message shows a curious variation of phrase in the statement of its various paragraphs: Nos. 1–6 give the aims as substantives—‘open covenants,’ ‘freedom of navigation,’ ‘removal of economic barriers and establishment of equality of trade,’ ‘adequate guarantees’ for limitation of armaments, ‘free . . . . adjustment of colonial claims,’ and ‘evacuation of all Russian territory’; Nos. 7 and 14 use the word ‘must’—with reference to the restoration of Belgium and the formation of a general association of nations; and Nos. 8–13 use the word ‘should’ with reference to the restoration of invaded French territory and the righting of the wrong of 1871, to the readjustment of Italian frontiers, the autonomy of the peoples of Austria-Hungary, the Balkan settlement, the Turkish settlement, and the erection of an independent Poland. Is this variation of phrase accidental, or does Mr. Wilson—who is usually able to say very precisely what he means—intend to suggest degrees of importance among the several aims proposed? One would be inclined to think so, were it not that the restoration of invaded French territory must obviously be an absolute condition, though it is stated as one of the ‘should’ items.”
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