all that empire with a steel bond of the Hamburg-to-Bagdad Railway and the Persian Gulf. That is to be interfered with. How? By the creation of the Czech-Slovak state and of ten million Slavs of Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia, which is a way station in Germany, on that railroad. That, with the Jugo-Slav state carved out of Southern Hungary and Southern Austria as they were, and Herzegovina, Bosnia, Croatia, reaching to the Adriatic, that is another block to the Central Empire. Then comes Transylvania, which contains more Rumanians than Hungarians, it is taken from Hungary and added to Rumania to make another block in the plan. Then we come to Constantinople to be under the League, to be administered for all the nations of the world and to keep open the straits between the Black Sea and the Ægean Sea.
New Nations Must Be Stabilized
And that bird, that lame, sick bird, Turkey, is to be eliminated from Europe. Her legs and wings and breast are to be cut up into autonomies, the autonomy of Palestine, the autonomy of Armenia, the autonomy of Syria, the autonomy of Arabia, and the autonomy of the Caucasus and the autonomy of Mesopotamia. If you count them over, you will find a dozen nations independent of the old empires created. They are for the strategic purpose of keeping the Central countries from again conspiring against the world. But that condition has to be stabilized. It is fluid now. There is a chaotic condition there and there must be some power to stabilize it. Treaties are to be as long as the moral law. The differences which will arise between them are myriad. Somebody will have to settle those differences. Somebody will have to see that the settlements are authoritative. Some power must exist to back up those settlements or else you will have confusion worse confounded and more war than ever before.
Then, over and above all is the spectre of Bolshevism that comes from Russia, militant Bolshevism, that awful doctrine, that doctrine that would overturn everything that is decent in society, that doctrine that Lenine announces is legitimately manifested in the dictatorship, whilst the Proletariat of two hundred thousand succeeds the dictatorship and lordly landowners of one hundred fifty thousand to rule over one hundred eighty millions, only distinguished from the former dictatorship "because it is in the interest of the masses," secured by force, secured by the suppression of every individual right, the right of free speech, the right of the free press, and secured by compulsory labor.
25
