and President Wilson’s final answer to Austria-Hungary was written in the same spirit.
Yet it was not I or Professor Herron who prejudiced the President against Austria. American democratic ideas turned his mind not only against Prussian Germanism but also against German Hapsburgism. The war was a moral question as well as a question of power, strategy and politics. True, Vienna was incapable of comprehending a moral issue and took no account of it. Thus it came to pass that American democracy, and democracy in general, buried the Hapsburg Monarchy and the Hapsburgs with it.
Incipit Vita Nova.
After President Wilson’s answer to Austria-Hungary and our Declaration of Independence on October 18, a new situation had to be faced. It gave us no little work. Austria, false to the last, left Germany in the lurch and begged Wilson for a separate peace on October 27; she accepted the humiliating condition he made in regard to us, but sought to interpret it to her own advantage. On this point I sent Secretary Lansing a Note—the last—to expose the cunning of Austrian policy; and Professor Herron advised the President direct to have nothing more to do with Austria since she was already a political corpse. For all eventualities I sought recognition from Belgium and Greece, after having received that of the other Allies, and took the necessary steps at their Legations in Washington on November 18. The recognition came from Athens on November 22 and from Brussels on November 28.
During the last fortnight of October and the first fortnight of November 1918, public attention was absorbed, in America as in Europe, by the rapid sequence of the scenes in the world-historic drama of which the last act had begun with the Russian revolution. Austria-Hungary collapsed and Prussian Germany was overthrown. On October 21 a revolution broke out in Vienna and also in Hungary. Count Tisza was murdered on October 31. Independent Austrian, Czechoslovak, Yugoslav and Magyar States arose out of the Austro-Hungarian ruin. In Germany the revolution began on October 28 with a mutiny in the fleet; at the beginning of November, Hamburg, Lübeck, Bremen, Munich and Berlin revolted. The Reichstag changed the Constitution and Parliamentarized the country, Ludendorff resigned, the Emperor William and the Crown Prince abdicated the Kaiser fleeing to Holland-and all German dynasties
