—a success due to a sober and practical conception of the whole situation—speaks in favour of its continuance.
The Problem of Minorities.
In some degree our foreign policy is determined by regard for our racial minorities. Save in the smallest States such minorities exist, inasmuch as a strictly ethnographical delimitation of frontiers is impracticable. Nationality, as expressed in terms of race, played little or no part in the formation of the majority of existing States. Indeed, the principle of nationality acquired State-creative power only in the modern era and, even then, it was not alone decisive.
No two minority questions are alike. Each presents peculiarities of its own. Our German minority in Czechoslovakia is a case in point. It is comparatively large, for it numbers three millions out of a total population of thirteen. Eleven European States count fewer than three million inhabitants. Our Germans are, moreover, mature in culture and are economically, industrially and financially strong. Politically, they suffer from the drawback that, under Austria, the Vienna Government looked after them to such an extent that their own political sense was not whetted. But at their back stands the great German people, and they are neighbours of Austria who is a neighbour of Germany.
Our claim that the German minority should remain with us is based on our historic right and on the fact that the Germans of Bohemia never attached value to union with Germany while they were under Austrian rule, or even in the time of the Bohemian Kingdom. It was modern pan-German propaganda that first gained adherents among them. During the war they sided with Austria and Germany against us. After the war, and particularly after the revolution in Prague, they sought to organize their own territory politically, but the very attempt proved the impossibility of coordinating their scattered and disconnected regions under one administration. The fact that they set up a variety of German units speaks for itself.
A Czech proposal, which was taken into consideration at the Peace Conference, was once made to cede a part of German Bohemia to Germany. The idea of delimiting the new States as far as possible according to nationality had no lack of supporters in England and America. Yet, on mature reflection, many political men with whom I discussed it, recognized that the discontinuity of important sections of our German territory,
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