THE CZECHS AND AUSTRIA
National Union has dissolved into its component parts, the Czechs, whose tendency to split into rival factions was so marked before the war, have been steadily closing their ranks, until Clerical and Socialist, agrarian and townsman, stand united upon a common national platform. While the authorities, for purposes of foreign consumption, dilated in pathetic accents upon what an outspoken German newspaper calls “the legend of loyalty and love to Austria,” Mr. Stanek, the leader of the Czech Parliamentary Club, was able to speak with the entire nation behind him. Even our inveterate Austrophils, who would fain throw doubt on the unanimity of a movement which does not fit into their calculations, must find it difficult to ignore the well-nigh unanimous testimony of German observers on the spot, that the whole Czech nation, without distinction of class or party, stands behind its present leaders. “Despite the censorship,” writes the Zeit, “the whole world knows what the Czechs want.”
For the Czechs the first two-and-a-half years of war were a period of unalloyed repression such as they had not known since the fifties of last century. Their leaders imprisoned or condemned for treason, their press muzzled, their institutions suppressed, parliamentary life at a standstill, denunciation and espionage rampant, their country garrisoned by hostile nationalities, the Czechs none the less maintained an attitude of stubborn defiance, and no amount of pressure could wrest from them any public profession of loyalty to a régime which had plunged them into war with their dearest kinsmen, in a quarrel not their own and by a decision over which they had no control, and on which they were not consulted. Nowhere did the Russian Revolution have a stronger repercussion than in Prague, and the effects were seen in the series of remarkable manifestoes issued during April and May by the leaders of Czech political and intellectual life. These culminated in the programme put forward at the meeting of the Reichsrat on 30 May by the Czech deputies, who declared their resolve to work, on the basis of self-determination, for the union of all Czechs and Slovaks in a single democratic state. Since that date the Czech leaders have again and again reaffirmed the nation’s claim to unity and independence, and have denounced the Dual System and Magyar oppression of the Slovaks with a frankness which has roused the Magyar jingoes to frenzy, and has been officially repudiated by the
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