Bohemia; a brief evaluation of Bohemia's contribution to civilization/Bohemia-A Foreword

by Harry Pratt Judson

Bohemia—A Foreword

By Harry Pratt Judson, LL. D.,
President of the University of Chicago.

T has long been the settled policy of the United States not to interfere with European international affairs. Indeed, President Monroe’s famous message of 1823, which laid the foundation of the Monroe Doctrine, specifically included this principle: “In the wars of the European powers, in matters relating to themselves we have never taken any part, nor does it con port with our policy so to do. It is only when our rights are invaded or seriously menaced that we resent injuries or make preparations for our defense.” Mr. Jefferson, in his letter to Monroe at that time, said: “Our first and fundamental maxim should be, never to entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe.” So Washington, in his farewell address, in like manner had made clear his view: “Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concern. Hence therefore it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics. Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course.”

Here we have the traditional American doctrine as regards European questions. It plainly may be enunciated in three propositions:

 

1. Differences among the European powers will almost never have any bearing on American interests.

2. With such differences therefore we will scrupulously avoid meddling.

3. Only in the remote contingency that our rights are seriously menaced should we prepare for defense.

Our experience of more than a century of national life has convinced us of the soundness of these principles, and further of the extreme unlikelihood of our having any direct concern in the questions that divide Europe. We have cared nothing for the balance of power, for the contro of Constantinople, or even for the partition of Africa. We have complacently looked on at the rivalries and collisions which these and other questions have involved, quite as if Europe were on another planet. The Atlantic is three thousand miles wide.

But now, suddenly we find that ancient wrongs in Europe are vitally involved with the very safety of our republic. We find that this vast war is not by any means a merely European concern. And these truths have come to us, as Jefferson said of the Missouri question, “like a fire-bell in the night.” In short, we find, to use Monroe’s words, that our rights have been invaded and are seriously menaced.

It is strange that serious international wrongs very seldom end in oblivion. Poland was torn to pieces by her piratical neighbors more than a century ago—and the question of Polish independence is a very real perplexity to the chancellories of belligerent nations today. There can be no safe settlement after this war unless there shall be a free Poland, dominated by no other power. In the early days of the last century Venice was shorn of Independence and with her Dalmatian provinces was turned over by Napoleon to Austria; the heel of the Hapsburg despot was on many of the fair Italian provinces; as Metternich said, Italy was a mere geographical expression. But Italy has become a nation and there can be no stable equilibrium until the remaining wrongs are righted. Alsace-Lorraine, again, was the German booty of 1871, and the Berlin Treaty of 1878 crippled the Balkan states just emerging from the long nightmare of Turkish oppression. Justice then would have saved the tranquillity of the world today.

So with Bohemia. An independent and vigorous state in the middle ages, early in the sixteenth century the Kingdom of the Czechs unhappily chose the Hapsburg Duke of Austria as king. From that error came three great wrongs to Bohemia.

The elective king made his rule that of a hereditary despotism.

The overthrow of the Bohemian insurgents in the Thirty Years’ War was followed by bloody reprisals. Many were put to death, others fled or were banished, lands confiscated, and place and soil were given to Germans, who thus became numerous and powerful in Bohemia. Their successors today are determined to keep the native Bohemians from governing their own country.

Finally, in 1867 the dual monarchy, Austria-Hungary, was constituted; but Bohemia was studiously prevented from a just share in freedom. By a long series of unjust measures and policies the Czechs were divided between Austria and Hungary; were cheated of their equitable representation in the diet of Bohemia and in that of the Empire; were kept a subject race.

And these injustices, dating centuries back in their origin, have made possible the Pan-German scheme of a Prussian Middle Europe, the ruthless attack on Serbia, the brutal war of German aggression on the civilization of the world. Bohemia, free and autonomous in the Austrian monarchy, would have made these calamaties impossible.

Remember that the Bohemians had no voice in bringing on this war. The war was made by the autocratic monarch; there was no meeting of the Austrian parliament from the spring of 1914 until the spring of 1917. Even then the fantastic injustice of the composition of the elective Austrian lower house is seen in the choice of a rabid Pan-German presiding officer by a vote of 215 to 195. Austria has a population of 10,000.000 Germans and 18,000.000 non-Germans.

So these old European wrongs in the end have endangered the freedom of the world, and have dragged America into the war maelstrom. The world will not be safe until the ancient wrongs are redressed. The Czecho-Slovaks, in Bohemia and Silesia and Moravia, must be free, within Austria or out of it. Then there will be a dike against the Pan-German flood against which its waves will dash in vain. Freedom and justice in central Europe will mean freedom and safety in the remotest parts of the earth.

Harry Pratt Judson.