Concerning Entente officials and the counter-revolution, all I can say is this: That it is widely believed by responsible persons that there is some mysterious relationship which does not blend with the general tone of the Hungarian Peace Treaty. Hungary has all this time been permitted to keep troops far in excess of the numbers laid down in the Treaty. The anti-democratic policy of the present Hungarian White Government has received no rebuke from the Allied Governments. The guarantees made to the Social-Democratic Government which succeeded Bela Kun were openly flouted. Only the strong agitation by democrats in England saved the lives of Professor Agoston and his colleagues, guaranteed by the British representative in Vienna; and these men are still in shameful imprisonment. And whether it is the fear of France that the union of Austria with Germany has become menacing through the attempt to make it impossible by denying to Austria the right of self-determination in the Peace Treaty, and the hope that the restoration of a Magyar ruler under French protection would counterbalance such an evil, or whether personal matters and the obligations of friendship enter into the calculation at all, it is quite certain that the tendencies towards a restoration of the old order are receiving encouragement from some amazing quarters. In all this the public suspicion rests rather upon France than upon Great Britain. The utmost of which Great Britain is accused is weakness in following, and indecision in the failure to grapple with, the Imperialists of France.
The union of Austria with Germany was the declared policy of the Social Democratic Party which took the reins of government after the abdication of the Emperor Charles. Dr. Otto Bauer, the Socialist Foreign Minister, proclaimed this policy from the housetops, thereby alienating the Allies, who demanded and secured his resignation in favour of the more tactful and diplomatic Renner. When I questioned Frau Freundlich, one of the women members of the Austrian Parliament, on the unwisdom of so outspoken a declaration of policy at such a time, with the nerves of France still atwitter with fright, she replied that open diplomacy was more honest and straightforward than secret diplomacy, and that the Socialists meant to carry out this principle of theirs regardless of consequences. I could only agree with the first part of her remark, adding to my words of approval that, even so, there was a time to speak and a time to be silent, and that this noble recklessness of consequences might be justified in a Party or a person but was doubtful wisdom on the part of a Government whose people needed food from the foe to keep them alive! Like Kurt Eisner and his passion for free speech, the Social Democrats of Austria would permit of no compromise in the matter of the Party programme.
I met Dr. Otto Bauer at the house of my friend Madame Zuckerkandl. We were quaintly assorted guests. There was the grave and dignified City Councillor Dr. Schwartz-Hiller, whose care of little Jewish refugees from Galicia deserves the highest praise. There was the wife of an impoverished ex-diplomat, who had spent many years in China and who was starving on a pension of almost nothing a month; there was Baron Hennet, the charming and able young diplomat whom I had met in Berne, known in England for his informed interest in agricultural matters and his advocacy of Free Trade; and finally there was Dr. Bauer.
He is a man of medium height, with a handsome young face, inclined to roundness, and the dark hair and brilliant eyes of the Jewish race. He is justly reputed one of the ablest men in the European Socialist Movement. Common report had it at one time that he is a Bolshevik; but his enemies did that for him! I inquired about him at the British Mission and they denied this story. I asked Dr. Bauer directly if he believed in Bolshevism and received a smiling but unequivocal reply in the negative. At the time of our talk he was helping to edit the great Socialist newspaper, the Arbeiter Zeitung, in the absence of the regular editor, Dr. Austerlitz, who was lying ill. His influence was much feared by the French. And his policy appears to-day to be likely to succeed in spite of the prohibition of the Peace Treaty, which forbids for all time the union with Germany unless with the unanimous approval of the League of Nations. If the Allies had determined on an act which would help the Austrians to achieve their desires they could not have done better than make it a point in the Treaty. The manifest injustice of refusing to Austria what is granted in theory to every other country in the world, the right to determine its own form of government, has united with the Social Democrats thousands of Austrians who had previously opposed this political proposal. Now it is clear from the Tyrol plebiscite of 97 per cent. in favour of the union that the policy has become national and must sooner or later be successful. The language of the Austrians is German. There appears to be little hope of substantial co-operation with the succession states for a very long time to come. The Austrians are ill-disposed to the eternal spoon-feeding of the Allies, which must mean expensive and irregular meals, with a constant threat of the withdrawal of supplies if something does not please the nurses. To the overwhelming majority of the six millions of Austria’s population the only means of living appears to be union with Germany, with a people speaking the same language and a country lying on their border.
But at the time of my visit to Austria there was a considerable difference of opinion in Vienna on the subject of the best future political arrangement for Austria. A number of people formerly of power and influence expressed hostility to the idea of union with Germany. They dreaded the merging of Austrian individuality in that of the stronger partner. They contemplated with real distress the future of their beautiful Vienna as a second-class city on the frontier of civilization instead of the sun and centre of culture which it had been. Some positively disliked the Prussian association because of its disciplined militarism. A few with the spirit of the flunkey desired to please the Allies. Others recognized the danger of flouting the Allies.
Of the various alternatives to the proposed union there were two which received noteworthy support, that which suggested union with the mild regime of a Bavaria independent of Prussia, and that which advocated what was called a Danubian Federation which should comprise the old states, and possibly Bavaria. The economic dependence of the states comprising the former Austro-Hungarian Empire was becoming clearer with every day that passed. The natural advantages as a clearing-house for trade and commerce of Vienna, in the centre of the system, as well as its amazing cultural facilities, provided every reason in common sense for a proposal of this sort. But hostile to the idea were those in Austria who would have welcomed an economic union apart from a political union, but who were unable to see how the one could be achieved without the other eventually following. The new states, particularly Czecho-Slovakia, jealous of any proposal which might restore to Vienna the importance they were determined to attach to Prague, pursued a policy of self-interest which menaced the very existence of Austria as an independent state, and looked askance at any idea of economic union between themselves and their ancient enemy. Anti-German feeling there was too pronounced for any other than the most individualistic action. Pro-German feeling in German-Austria favoured the union with Germany. The propaganda for the federation was conducted chiefly by agents abroad, and as I have already shown, a succession of events has made the proposal for union with Germany, originally the proposal of a party, a matter of united national policy.
Apart from its foreign policy the political problem of Austria appeared to be presenting itself along the line of peasant versus town worker. This is more or less true of every country in Europe. The peasants hated the city of Vienna. They had to maintain the two and a quarter millions of its population and got no adequate return for this in manufactured goods. The city could not manufacture for lack of raw materials and coal. The peasants disliked the “Red” Government because it fixed the price of foodstuffs in the interests of the poor of the towns careless of the reduced profits of the peasants. They disliked the towns because they were irreligious and full of the hated Jews. All these causes worked (and are working all over Central Europe and in Russia) at the time I was in Vienna.
“I very much fear,” said Otto Bauer to me, “that the social problem of Europe for a generation or more will be the town against the country. And which will win?” The victory of the country seems imminent. It has conquered in Bavaria and, in a measure, in Austria. It will conquer in Russia. And the victory of the country in European politics does not mean maypoles and flowers and flowing beer and fat living for everybody. It means, at present, the reign of ignorance and bigotry and superstition and individualism, and the decline of all the things which make for a cultivated civilization.