Bohemia—a foreword
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,
