By the time this fallacy had been exploded, the United States and the Allies were faced by the tragical farce of Russia's dissolution, which justifies still more the contention that Germany's aims of world-supremacy can be thwarted only by the constitution of independent States, comprising the several races so long oppressed by the House of Hapsburg. A reunited Poland, a free Bohemia, a SerboCroatia within reasonable linguistic frontiers, and a strengthened Roumania must form the barrier against which the menacing flood of " Mittel-European" ambitions will be irretrievably broken.

One of the principal arguments set forward by the champions of the Austrian Empire is, its necessity for the peace and so-called " equilibrium" of Europe. They urge that to break up Austria would mean the immense strengthening of Germany, as the ten million German-speaking Austrians must, in self-defense, coalesce with the German Empire to which they have ever been attracted by identity of race, language, interests and culture, while, on the other hand, the ten million Magyars, hemmed in by hostile CzecoSlovacks, Poles, Roumanians and Serbo-Croats, would more than ever be the champions of Germanism, and ready to kindle conflagrations in the East. They insinuate that the Danubian Monarchy (reorganized as a Federation under the House of Hapsburg) might yet be Great Britain's and France's most powerful ally against Germany, whispering engagingly, at the same time, that the Hapsburgs have never forgotten the humiliations suffered at the hands of Prussia, nor relinquished their legitimate hegemonic designs over the German-speaking race, snatched from them by the Hohen

zollerns.

These specious arguments are entirely based upon falsehoods and destroyed by a logical examination of facts. The Germans in Cis-Leithania, as the Magyars in TransLeithania, form the predominant factor, under the leadership of officials of those nationalities, and others chosen among the most reactionary nobility of Bohemia and Poland, with a few renegade Croats and Italians. Gerrymandering is for them a fine art, and by pertinaciously sowing hate and distrust between coexisting races or sects, they have managed to foment internecine struggles to their exclusive benefit, so that in this proposed preservation of Austria it is not ten or twenty millions that would be definitely thrown in the

arms of Teutonism, but the whole of the fifty-one millions of the Austrian Empire. One fact must be emphasized. The ties riveting Austria to Germany are incomparably stronger than identity of race, language or hate; Austria has totally relinquished its individuality, and its despotic Ally curbs with brutal outspokenness the dwindling attempts of its "ward" to assert its rights. The results of the BrestLitovsk Conference, whether Lenin and Trotsky were paid agents of Germany or hare-brained ideologists acting in good faith, have diverted Germany's attention from the irremediably lost Berlin-Bagdad scheme, to another, even more promising because of its enormous natural resources. Through the trumped-up Ukrainian Republic and the Caucasus lies the road to Persia, and from there on to India and China. It has Odessa as port of entry in a fully Germanized Black Sea, protected by the Dardanelles, which, by a remarkably short-sighted policy, the Allies seem inclined to leave in the hands of Turkey, and by Austria, paramount in the Balkans. But the success of this far-reaching and ambitious plan, with its ultimate aim of dealing a mortal stroke to the " arch-enemy " England, in its most vital spot, India, depends upon one condition: the preservation of Austria, to which is entrusted the most important mission. Abutting upon Ukrainia, the economic resources and racial idiosyncrasies of which Austrian statesmen have mastered by years of secret separatist propaganda and stealthy espionage, Austria forms Germany's bridge-head on the great road to India. Deprived of this bridge-head, the gigantic plan crumbles to pieces, and Germany, isolated by a hostile ring of nations, constricted into frontiers rigorously closed to its "commercial penetration," would be incapable of jeopardizing the world's peace, and then, but only then, the seemingly utopian scheme of an universal brotherhood of nations might become a reality.

Another argument advanced in support of Austria's integrity is that the new States to be formed by its disruption comprise nationalities either notoriously incapable of selfgovernment (Poles), or not sufficiently homogeneous (Czechs), or not clearly defined (Serbo-Croats). Numberless causes of social and political unrest would arise in these immature communities, when no longer controlled by the Austrian authorities who are thoroughly trained by centuries of practice to deal with those complicated racial problems.

A rapid survey will prove the disingenuousness of these

assertions.

Poland appears at first as most disheartening. It seems as if the Poles were dragged apart by centrifugal forces. But the secret of this is hidden in the deep schemes of its Austrian masters, and may explain likewise those alternatives of pro- and anti-Slav tendencies, interpreted often by puzzled observers as symptomatic rifts in the lute of AustroGerman complicity. The Poles, petted and cajoled by Austria, had ceased to consider the possibility of a reunion with their brethren, either martyrized by the brutal assaults of Pan-Germanists, or debased by the more subtle tyranny of Czarism. The war came to awaken the dormant Polish conscience, because of the Czar's promise of autonomy to Poland, followed later, as a counterblast, by the AustroGerman proclamation of an independent Polish State, from which, however, was carefully excluded any portion of Polish territory under Prussian domination. Even the solemn farce of a Polish "Provisional Government" and of the "Polish Legions," staged by Germany, helped to awaken the race, and when President Wilson, in accord with the Prime Ministers of Great Britain, France and Italy, proclaimed as a fundamental axiom for the peace of Europe, the necessity of a free and united Poland comprising every inch of Polish soil, and with an access to the Baltic, a great thrill went through the nation, and it has ever more and more explicitly manifested its cohesion, as lately when the cession of the Kholm territory to Ukrainia caused a storm of protest, even among the highest Polish officials in the service of Austria.

The apologists of the Danubian Monarchy point out that in Bohemia the Czechs form only sixty-five per cent of the population, the other thirty-five per cent being Germans, and that the Czechs themselves are subdivided in a large number of factions ever ready to fly at each other's throats. But they omit to say that Bohemia and Moravia form a wellindividualized unit, with clearly defined frontiers; they are silent concerning the fact that the Germans were deliberately imported into Bohemia to denationalize the country; and they include Czechs, Germanized by those systems of violence and corruption of which Austrian rulers are past masters. As to the intestine dissensions among the Czechs themselves, the resolutions voted by the great meeting of Prague, at which, without one single exception, all the Members of the

Czech delegation to the Austrian Reichsrat were present and which, though suppressed by the censor, have been published by Dr. Benès, Secretary of the Czeco-Slovack Committee in London, leave no possible doubt that the Czechs have but one aspiration: that so pithily expressed by the Denny Hélas, the Slovack paper of Cleveland, O., " the complete dismemberment and dissolution of that absurd (Austrian) empire, vassal, satellite and ruthless instrument of Militarism and Kaiserism."

The Serbo-Croats form at present, it has been said, the weakest link in the chain of arguments propounded by those who uphold the dismemberment of the Austrian Empire. Their somewhat exaggerated claims, which often clash with the just aspirations of the Italian race, have been grossly distorted by those who have the greatest interest in sowing irreparable dissension between Jugo-Slavs and Italians. Though the writer's nationality might seem an unavoidable obstacle to an objective attitude, it will be safe to say that mutual good will is required to settle all differences, and to quote the words of Dr. Trumbic himself, the signer, with the Serbian Prime Minister Pacic, of the Pact of Corfu, “that nine millions of Jugo-Slavs have but one aim, their liberation from the debasing slavery imposed upon them by Austrians and Magyars."

Very few words are needed about Roumania. Though apparently engulfed in an appalling disaster by the treason of Bolshevist Russia and Ukrainia, that intrepid race has kept intact all its potentialities, and it is no empty rhetoric to proclaim that because of its magnificent steadiness, Roumania is entitled to reunite under her flag those of her sons, in the West as well as in the East, who have been separated from the mother-country. They will assuredly form the most resolute, if not the principal, barrier against all dreams of Teutonic conquests in the East.

The demonstration that the dismemberment of Austria is of paramount importance, on political grounds, for the stability of the world's peace, seems so incontrovertible that one is inclined to wonder how this obvious fact has not struck most forcibly those whose duty it is to reorganize civilization.

But there is yet another, and much higher, ethical reason for which the Austro-Hungarian Empire should be pitilessly blotted out of its corporate existence. It is almost impossible to conceive how President Wilson, the exponent of Justice

and Humanity's most sublime ideals, should be willing "to extend an open hand to Austria," as the Philadelphia Public Ledger summarizes his last great Message. Is President Wilson fully aware of the revolting outrages perpetrated by Austrian officials not only upon harmless non-combatant enemies, but upon their own co-citizens of Slav and Italian birth? Mr. Gladstone in an historic letter branded the Bourbon Government of Naples as the "negation of God"; what terms would he have used to designate that of AustriaHungary?

In a speech pronounced on the 19th of October, 1917, in the Austrian Reichsrat, Mr. Tresic-Slavicic, the prominent Jugo-Slav poet, has denounced such acts of unparalleled cruelty as the history of civilized Europe has never registered. This speech, only half of which, and in a very mutilated form, has passed out of Austria, says textually among many other things:

"During four nights we were penned in a stable from which one hundred carts of manure had just been removed. . . . suffocated by the fetid stench of urine and forced to look upon the Magyar soldiers spitting in the food prepared for us. . . In Mostar, the most terrible was the head-gaoler, Gaspar Scheller, armed with a curved iron stick he had nicknamed "Kronprinz." He beat the prisoners on head and shoulders till the blood squirted, insulting them meanwhile with diabolical fury... Many, as the Editor of the Narod and the Rev. Tichy, succumbed at the hands of this tiger... The hostages were chosen from amongst the most distinguished and cultivated members of the community, and very few were able to stand this martyrdom to the end... To be chosen as a hostage was equivalent to a sentence of death. They died by the hundred. . . From Mostar the prisoners were taken to Arad, already overcrowded by several thousand hostages from Herzegovina. During the journey the Hungarian rabble pelted them with stones and mud and spat in their faces. Starving, naked, exhausted, urged on with bayonet-thrusts and blows from the butt-ends. of muskets, they were herded as cattle in bomb-proofs infested with bugs and lice. In those long, narrow underground corridors, even in winter, the atmosphere was heavy as with a noisome vapour. Very soon spotted fever developed, called with ghastly humor by the hostages: Tunnelitis Terribilis' . Later they succumbed to it in masses. For entire nights the living lay side by side with the dead .on the fetid straw. . .only noticed when the stench of corruption betrayed their presence.. The dead were thrown in heaps upon carts and escorted by Magyar soldiers howling with joy. The dead at Arad were from three to four thousand. . .'

From Bohemia little by little other unspeakable horrors