into the national army. And now all these “Austrians” in Uncle Sam’s uniform are transformed by the stroke of pen into enemies. Under the present law they cannot become citizens. What are you going to do with them? Then there are many more thousands of these “enemies” on the registration lists. In some districts in Chicago or Pennsylvania they actually make up a majority of the registrants. They will not claim exemption as alien enemies; no fear of that. But the provost marshall was obliged under the law to instruct the local boards not to send to the training camps any one who is an alien enemy, whether he claims exemption or not. That means that in many districts American citizens in the deferred classes, men with families, will be called out in the next draft, while other be called out in the next draft, while in other districts only men without dependents will be selected.
There is a simple remedy for all this unfairness both to the alien and to the American registrant. Less than 20% of the Austro-Hungarian subjects in this country are Germans and Magyars who alone deserve to be classed as enemies, because their kinsmen on the other side fight willingly on the side of our enemies. All the rest, the Bohemians, Slovaks, Poles, Ruthnians, Jugoslavs, Roumanians, Italians, hope for the victory of the Allies. Take away from imigrants of these races the stigma of alien enemy.
Before the House of Representatives there is now pending a joint resolution introduced by Representative Sabath of Illinois, covering this very point. It provides in brief that the Slav and Latin races of Austria-Hungary, enumerating them, shall be expressly declared not to be enemies, and that men of these races resident here shall be eligible to serve in the army and shall be subject to the draft. Of course, the Austrian government will not admit the right of its subjects to expatriate themselves and swear allegiance to an enemy, and when the first Bohemian or Croatian or Roumanian soldier in the American army is captured somewhere on the Italian front, the Austrian authorities will be tempted to execute him. But the threat of reprisals on the part of the American government, as well as the danger of an outburst among the subject races, will prevent any barbarities by Austrian generals.
A law, such as the Sabath resolution, will do more than remedy an unjust and awkward situation. It will have a great effect on the internal situation in Austria. The fact is, unfortunately, that President Wilson’s carefully correct reference to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the same address in which he asked for a declaration of war was bound to have an adverse effect on the sentiments of the majority of the Hapsburg subjects. Imagine the mental processes of the Bohemians, for instance, during the year that just passed. When it opened, they were ground down by ruthless military rule, their leaders in prison or exile or grave, their newspapers muzzled, political life suspended, their men slaughtered on far away battlefields in a hateful cause, their own bellies empty most of the time—and all of that misery due to their rulers. On January 10 comes the glorious news that the Allies with whom the Czech people sympathized from the very beginning, promised to liberate the oppressed races of Austria-Hungary from foreign domination. A little later comes the great news of the Russian revolution, and as a consequence of it the relaxation of the police regime in Austria, reopening of the parliament and a new political life. And now, rejecting promises of autonomy, spurning threats and blandishments, the Bohemian deputies lead a determined opposition in the Vienna Parliament and boldly demand an independent Czechoslovak state. No pressure of any kind could induce the Czechs to repudiate the promise extended to them by the Allies. Rejecting promises of constitutional reform they took the stand that the Bohemian question could not be settled in Vienna, but belonged before the peace conference. And now, at the end of the year, so momentous in the history of Bohemia, President Wilson, the one man in whom Bohemian hopes were centered, declares that “we do not wish in any way to impair or to rearrange the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is no affair of ours what they do with their own life either industrially or politically.”
We who know the real sentiments of the President, the many difficulties of his exalted position, the widely different and widely scattered audiences to all of whom his speech was addressed, feel that the President of the United States is not callous to the sufferings of the subjects races of Austria-Hungary under the tyrany of their German and Magyar rulers. But over there on the Danube the people cannot know all that. Very naturally Count Czernin made
