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Czech peasants refused to give up provisions, and thus the Czechs, who already before the war boycotted German goods, accelerated the present economic and financial ruin of Austria. Politically, too, they contributed to the internal confusion of the Dual Monarchy, and to-day their opposition forms a real menace to the existence of Austria.
As deputy Klofac put it at a meeting in Laibach on August 15: "Henceforward the Czechs will refuse to hold any negotiations with Vienna, with whom any compromise is now out of the question.
The Czechs like other central and east European countries mistook a transatlantic tiff for a geopolitical divorce and tried to implausibly capitalize on the yawning rift that opened between the erstwhile allies. Yet, Germany is one of the largest trading partners of the United States. American firms sell $24 billion worth of goods annually there compared to $600 million in Poland.
The expedition was to be large enough to proceed southward without the Czechs, sending them back to the West by the returning ships if their morale should prove to be too low for the stern task to be essayed on the restored Eastern Front.
Here too he was in contradiction with the attitude that he had adopted both before and after this event, for he must have known what a sorry part the Czechs had played and still were playing as regards the Vienna Democracy and the efforts for Hungarian emancipation.
There was, indeed, a bond of sympathy, for in each of the enemy capitals a ruling caste oppressed one or more subject nationalities. Prussia stood for the Junker domination of the German tribes; Austria, for Teutonic government of Czechs, Slovaks, and Poles; Hungary, for Magyar dictation to Jugo-Slavs and Rumanes; and Turkey, for the exploitation or extermination of Armenians, Greeks, and Arabs.
Several thousand of them made their way across Siberia, across the Pacific Ocean, across America, across the Atlantic to France and Italy, where they are fighting by the thousands in the armies of the Entente. The problem of how to get aid to the Czechs without angering the Russian people is a big one for the allied statesmen.
The Czechs in Bohemia, the Magyars in Hungary, the Germans in Austria, rose against the paralysing encumbrance of the Hapsburg autocracy. The Southern Slavs dreamed of an Illyrian kingdom; the Germans of a united Germany; the Bohemians of a union of all the Slavonic peoples of Europe.
The Czechs and the Serbs approve of me also, and the French are not indifferent. The mysteries of love I fathomed at the age of thirteen. With my colleagues, doctors, and literary men alike, I am on the best of terms. I am a bachelor. I should like to receive a pension.
Both the Yugoslav and the Polish press greeted this declaration with undisguised joy and sympathy. The Glos Naroda welcomed the Czech declaration, and added: "Those who to-day are asking for an independent national existence do not claim anything but the minimum of their rights. The Nowa Reforma also said that the Czechs were quite right to ask for full independence.
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