THE AUSTRIAN MUDDLE
that the leading newspaper in Austria, the Neue Freie Presse, which for years before the war did all in its power to envenom the relations of the two races, should now be following the lead of its political and financial patrons in Berlin in urging moderation.
The effect of the amnesty has merely been to increase the political confusion. It is intensely and unanimously resented by the Germans of Austria, who are less than ever inclined for compromise, for the simple reason that rather than surrender to the Slavs any further instalment of political power in Austria, they would prefer to unite themselves bodily with their kinsmen in the German Empire. If, in the words of a prominent German journalist, the amnesty has had a “positively paralysing” effect on the Germans, it has roused the Magyar jingoes to fury: and a phrase coined in Budapest has gone the rounds of the Press to the effect that the Czechs are fighting Austria on two fronts—in Galicia and in the Reichsrat. The first half of this jibe refers to the exploits of the Czecho-Slovak brigade, as announced in a recent communiqué of General Brusilov, the second receives added point from the latest action taken by the Czechs in Parliament. In the Constitutional Committee of the Reichsrat on 5 July, Professor Redlich (the well-known constitutional authority and the least Slavophile of German deputies) made conciliatory overtures to the Czechs, but was met in an absolutely uncompromising spirit by Dr. Stransky. This speaker, who in a recent speech had declaimed against the Austrian fortress of Peter and Paul,[1] and had quoted the famous saying that Bohemia had existed before Austria, and would exist after her, now declared that the Czechs declined to negotiate with the Germans before the Peace Conference. This statement, which caused a profound sensation in Parliament, was at once interpreted by the Germans as an attempt to make the fate of the Czecho-Slovaks an international question, and the explanations offered next day by its author are not calculated to diminish the impression. He had merely declared, he said, that as self-determination for all European nations till now under foreign rule had been generally accepted as a condition of peace, it would be well to await the results of the Peace Congress, where both groups of belligerents and the neutrals would be represented. While
- ↑ The Russian prison for political offenders.
13
