THE UKRAINE PROBLEM
Ukrainian leaders in Vienna in the previous March, under pressure from the Austrian authorities, had equally alarmed Chauvinist opinion among the Russians and the Poles. The promise of a complete Ruthene University at Lvov had now become definite, and on many sides the opinion was openly heard that its opening would be regarded as a casus belli by the Petrograd Government. Galicia swarmed with spies, and the traffic in military information assumed unheard-of dimensions. Thus each move and countermove added to the explosive material which already lay to hand, when the final catastrophe came.
A subsequent article will deal with the radical transformation of the Ukraine problem, as a result of the Russian revolution and the progress of the Federal Republican idea.
Mr. Lloyd George on Serbia
The Serbian Society is to be congratulated on having assembled so representative a company in the Savoy Hotel on 8 August to do honour to our most sorely-tried ally in the person of her veteran Prime Minister. The presence of Mr. Lloyd George, in the midst of many urgent calls upon him, and of Lord Robert Cecil gives good warrant for the belief that the Government is fully alive to the importance of encouraging the Serbian nation in its hour of trial. Mr. Lloyd George’s speech—a little masterpiece of eloquence— will give every Serb new life in these critical days: and Lord Robert Cecil’s declaration, spoken with all the emphasis of deliberation, will be read in every Southern Slav land as proof of British goodwill to the Southern Slav cause. We have travelled far from the days when a popular London weekly could cry “To hell with Serbia.” The war has torn aside the veil which the diplomacy of Vienna had hung between us and the Serbian people who at last stand revealed before us as an intrepid nation “rightly struggling to be free.” There can be few in Great Britain who have not now learned that the twin causes of Serbian freedom and Southern Slav unity are British interests in the highest sense of the word, that our duty to the British Commonwealth and our championship of the little peoples of Europe compel us to make the Serbian cause our own. We believe that the nation is daily growing more alive to the importance of a good
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