[46] This figure refers to that part of East Prussia which will unquestionably remain to Germany. If the Mazurian and Marienwerder plebiscite areas vote to remain with Germany, the number of Germans cut off from the Reich by the Polish couloir will be a little over 2,000,000.
[47] The total population of the city and its district in 1910 was 324,000, of which number only 16,000 were entered in the census as having Polish as their ‘mother tongue.’
[48] I owe the comparison to Mr. L. B. Namier’s excellent article on “Poland’s Outlet to the Sea,” in The Nineteenth Century, Vol. 81 (1), Feb. 1917.
[49] Ralph Butler, The New Eastern Europe, p. 4.
VI
AUSTRIA
The Prince de Ligne, dying in the midst of the carnival of revelry that marked the Congress of Vienna, declared that he was preparing a new amusement for the jaded appetite of that assembly: the obsequies of a Field Marshal, a Knight of the Golden Fleece. A no less unique, but far graver, spectacle was provided for the Peace Conference of Paris: the obsequies of a great empire, the oldest and proudest in Europe.
Even without deploring that event, one cannot be altogether untouched by the spectacle of the collapse of the Hapsburg monarchy, with its stirring historic past and its illustrious traditions, the state which in one sense could trace its genealogy back to Charlemagne and Augustus Caesar, the realm of Charles V, the Ferdinands, Maria Theresia, Joseph II; the old indomitable
“Oesterreich,
An Ehren und an Siegen reich,”
of Wallenstein and Prince Eugene.
Austria had a raison d’être, had she only known how to live up to it. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, she rendered a real service to the peoples of Central Europe in uniting them into one realm capable of checking and repelling the Turkish flood. And later on, when the Turks had ceased to threaten, she might have acquired a new right to existence by educating her various races to self-government, offering them the advantages of membership in a large political and economic union combined with local autonomy and due respect for the rights and individuality of each race, anticipating in this realm, which, with its medley of nationalities, was a kind of miniature Europe, the solutions which the League of Nations will have to seek. After all, it was a Czech patriot who declared that if the Austrian monarchy did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.