Of the new states created by the Paris treaties, Czechoslovakia has had the most uneventful existence and is by all odds the most flourishing. In fact, it is the only one of the Succession States to the Hapsburg Empire whose political and economic life is functioning normally. When one arrives in Prague, one is immediately struck with the naturalness of the new rÉgime. It is as if it had always been. And when one goes to the Burg and visits the offices of the new Government, which has now been functioning under the control of the same men for nearly five years, there is no feeling of coming into contact with something parvenu or inchoate or absurd. Across from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs workmen are busy on the cathedral. “When was this started?” I asked. “We have been working on this addition—in reality it is the main part of the cathedral, you know—for six hundred years.” Nothing illustrates better the spirit reigning to-day in Czechoslovakia. Freed from a bad dream, the old Kingdom of Bohemia is taking up once more the problem of playing an independent rÔle in central Europe.

An American in Vienna told me that Czechoslovakia was “a Bologna sausage impossibly sprawling across the map,” and expressed in no uncertain terms his belief in the approaching collapse of a country “without natural frontiers and economic or geographical raison d’Être and made up of a congeries of races among which the Czechs are in the minority.” An Austrian cabinet minister added, “The old racial and irredentist problems of this part of the world were not solved by the treaties of St.-Germain and Trianon; they were only transferred from Vienna to Prague.”

If one considers the question of the viability of Czechoslovakia from the strict point of view of geography and ethnography, there would indeed seem to be little hope for the future of this curiously composite state. Czechoslovakia is long and narrow, and part of her frontiers are arbitrary. Out of a population of less than 13,000,000, there are more than 3,000,000 Germans and nearly 1,000,000 Hungarians. Ruthenians or Ukrainians number 500,000. And there are Jews and some Poles. Whether the Czechs are outnumbered by “alien races” depends upon the classification of the two other branches of the Slav family in the body politic. Are Moravians and Slovaks different people from the Czechs? Even if they be counted as the same or similar, possessing common historical traditions, using kindred languages, sharing common aspirations, and being willing to throw their lot in with the Czechs, there is a difference in culture—a striking difference. The Slovaks and the peoples of other regions ceded by Hungary to Czechoslovakia contain a large percentage of illiterates. The Czechs in the Kingdom of Bohemia are virtually all literate. The wife of a cabinet minister told me that she had never in her life met anybody who could not read and write. What American could say the same?

President Masaryk is a Moravian, and General Stefanik is a Slovak. These two men, together with Dr. Benes, a Czech, were the leaders in securing the recognition of Czechoslovak independence, and have succeeded in retaining the confidence of their people during the formative years of the new republic. This fact in itself, however, is not indicative of a real fusion of the Slavic elements. It will be remembered that even during the war some of the most prominent Austrian statesmen were Czechs, notably Count Czernin. The Czechs make up 46 per cent of the population of the new state, and even with the Slovaks amount to only 60 per cent. The two million Slovaks have insisted upon autonomy from the very beginning of the national life, and only their cultural inferiority has prevented them from acting as the Croats have acted in Jugoslavia.

The greatest problem is that of the Germans, who live in a more or less compact mass in regions contiguous to Germany and Austria. Were it not for two saving factors in the situation, the natural mountain frontier separating the Germans of Bohemia from Germany and the cultural equality of the Czechs with the Germans, the presence in the body politic of a German bloc, comprising 27 per cent of the total population, would make Czechoslovakia a hopeless proposition. For, after the collapse of the Central Empires, the Germans of Bohemia declared themselves united to Austria and opposed to the bitter end the determination of the Peace Conference to put them under Czech rule in defiance of the right of self-determination. The Germans form a separate party in the Czechoslovak parliament, and use their own language in addressing the chair and in debates. They assert that they are citizens of Czechoslovakia against their will and that they had no part in forming the new constitution under which they are governed. They resent the sudden change of fortune of the Teutonic master race. Their new position is humiliating.

But powerful material considerations have led them to make the best of a bad business and to accept the fait accompli. Austria is in a sorry plight, and the condition of Germany is not much better. The Germans of Czechoslovakia are far better off, although politically depressed, than Germans in any other part of the world. Comparatively speaking, the country of which they are now citizens is prosperous, and they form a large enough element to be able to stand up for their rights in the new state. The danger to Czechoslovakia of containing so large a German population will come only when Germany has rehabilitated herself, or if Austria succeeds in reaching a degree of prosperity equal to that of Czechoslovakia.

On the other hand, despite the large minorities, Czechoslovakia has an excellent chance of lasting and, by a steadily increasing prosperity, making her unwilling citizens content with their lot. Czechoslovakia is the only new state formed wholly out of the Hapsburg Empire. Prague does not have the problems of Bucharest, Belgrade, and Warsaw, where peoples separated through centuries and impregnated with different cultures and radically divergent political ideals and political experience have been brought together under a new roof. Not a portion of the Czechs but all of them have had political education and have been familiar with suffrage and parliamentary life. The Czechs had their quota of functionaries in the Hapsburg Empire, which gives them trained men for government service. Without intending offense, one might say that the Czechs are the most promising of the newly emancipated people because they are German-trained in public life, administration, and education, as well as in business. They possess a German mentality—in the better sense of that term—and this is the reason they have made such wonderful progress in five years and present to the visitor the picture of a state functioning without confusion and possessing all that makes for durability.

From large portions of Jugoslavia and Rumania it is going to take a long time to obliterate the four centuries of subjection to Ottoman rule. Rumania and Poland have elements that remained for centuries under the Russian yoke. Bohemia was in slavery, but gentle slavery. The Slavs were discriminated against, it is true, but not in a way fatal to their cultural or economic development. The country was not partitioned, and Austrian rule could not be compared with that of Turkey or Russia. The territories that go to make up Czechoslovakia shared the prosperity of the last half-century of the Hapsburg Empire, and they contained—already developed—factories, mines, and agricultural and forest industries second to none in Europe. Mark the words “already developed.” When you go to Bucharest or Belgrade or Warsaw you are told what the people hope to do, and the potential wealth of the country is impressed upon you. Foreign capital is essential, and there is the constant anxiety that its introduction be not accompanied by political subserviency to the great powers and economic dependence upon them. But at Prague you do not have to visualize the future. The actual wealth of the country and its existing machinery for production are sufficient guarantees of its ability to live alone. Railways do not have to be built: they are already there. Men do not have to go through the painful stages of learning parliamentary manners, and officials are not running around madly with more good will than knowledge. Czechoslovakia is the one going concern created by the Paris Conference.

In several respects the birth of Czechoslovakia differed from that of Poland and Jugoslavia and from the formation of Greater Rumania and Greater Greece.

Alone among the smaller peoples subject to the Central Empires or influenced by them, the Czechoslovaks from the beginning of the World War made up their minds that their bread was buttered on the side of an Entente victory. Unlike the Poles and Jugoslavs, they deserted from the Austro-Hungarian armies on every occasion, and when they went over to the Entente they risked being shot for treason if captured when fighting in the Entente armies. They rendered appreciable services by this technical disloyalty, and before the end of the war they had under arms divisions on three battle-fronts and an army in Siberia. Their leaders who managed to escape from the country burned their bridges behind them, and those who stayed at home, like Dr. Kramar, first premier of the new state, almost lost their lives by insisting during the war upon the resurrection of Bohemia as one of the conditions of peace.

Added to loyalty to the cause of those to whom they looked for emancipation was an amazing sense of moderation, unique among the liberated peoples. Before the emancipation the Czechs were willing to be guided by the councils of the great powers, and after the liberation they took a sensible view toward minorities. They did not combat or attempt to override the decisions of the Peace Conference. Curious as it was, their new state was spontaneously formed by the recognition of the Bohemian claims to statehood by Austria just before the collapse, and by the voluntary adhesion of national councils in Moravia, Silesia, Slovakia, and Russina to the nucleus of a common government already formed at Prague. The Prague authorities gained no territory by conquest, and arms did not have to be used against the German and Hungarian minorities, whose incorporation in the new state was provided for by the Treaties of St.-Germain and Trianon.

Rumania based her territorial claims upon a definite agreement with the Entente Powers, embodied in a secret treaty, which was the price paid for her intervention. Greece relied upon Premier Venizelos’ skilful manoeuvering in the mazes of Entente Near Eastern diplomacy. The Poles put their cause in the hands of France from the beginning, and, having been saved by France at the time of the Bolshevist invasion in 1920, became more convinced than ever that their salvation lay in listening to the Quai d’Orsay. The Jugoslav problem was singularly complicated by the unwillingness of the Pan-Serbs, under Premier Pashitch, to make up their minds in 1918 whether they wanted a Greater Serbia or a new state, Jugoslavia, in which old Serbia would lose her identity. The Czechoslovaks were not compelled and did not feel the inclination to seek the favor of any one great power or to play one power against another. Only in the dispute with the Poles over Teschen was there a momentary embarrassment. In all other questions the Czechoslovaks were lucky in not having their interest conflict with the ambitions of the great powers. They made only one serious blunder at Paris, which is reacting unfavorably against them to-day in Slovakia. That was when they agreed to include in their new state the island and mainland along the Danube east of Pressburg (Bratislava). This was awarded to them for strategic reasons, but they now see that the burden of half a million Hungarians subjects was too big a price to pay for it.

The success of Czechoslovakia in her foreign policy has been largely due to the ability and continuity in office of Dr. Benes, a Prague university professor, and a refugee in Paris during the war, who worked for years, in the face of every discouragement, to enlist the sympathy of the Entente Powers in the Czech cause. When the hour of liberation came, the Czechs had the good sense to keep Benes in Paris as delegate at the Peace Conference, and to make him minister of foreign affairs. Dr. Benes established the following basic principles of Czechoslovak foreign policy: (1) help to Austria and an economic understanding with Austria; (2) prevention of an attempt on the part of Hungary to upset the Treaty of Trianon by an alliance with Rumania and Jugoslavia, the two other beneficiaries of that treaty; (3) steadfast refusal to become the catspaw of any other power or group of powers in dealings with Russia; (4) realization of the patent fact that security against Germany in the future could not be obtained by any particular alliance but only by the functioning of an all-inclusive society of nations.

The Czechoslovak Government has differentiated clearly between Austria and Hungary as potential enemies. It has assumed that Italy can be relied upon never to allow an independent Austria to become a military menace, and that France is vitally interested in preventing the union of Austria with Germany. An Austria impotent militarily but still able to exist independently is what Czechoslovak interests demand, and it is comforting to realize that two great powers are natural allies in the attainment of these two objects. Because Italy mounts guard against a recurrence of Austrian militarism, Czechoslovakia can afford to see Austria flourish economically. In fact, the prosperity of Austria is an aim of Czechoslovak foreign policy, in which France can be counted upon to help, because the union of Austria with Germany would be a calamity to France and Czechoslovakia alike.

Dr. Benes maintains that the sweeping changes of the Treaty of St.-Germain were necessary to make possible an absolutely free hand for former subject peoples in dealing with former masters. It is as essential to separate Hungary from Austria along the Danube as it is for the Czechoslovaks to have an outlet to that river. But Czechoslovakia would be foolish to abuse her freedom of action by rendering the economic life of Austria intolerable. On the contrary, the economic and political interests of Czechoslovakia dictate making every effort to help Austria rehabilitate herself. Through Austria passes Czechoslovakia’s outlet to the Mediterranean. The two states are neighbors and must logically trade with each other. Most important of all, unless life is made tolerable for Austria she will be forced into union with Germany. And this would menace the very existence of Czechoslovakia!

The Czechoslovak attitude toward Hungary is quite different from that toward Austria. No great powers are particularly interested in holding Hungary down, and Italy is suspected of encouraging Hungary to check her nightmare of Slavic predominance on the Adriatic. East of the White Carpathians the Slovaks and the Ruthenians are not accustomed to the separation from Hungary and not altogether reconciled to it. The Czechs are not culturally inferior to the Germans; the Slovaks are culturally inferior to the Hungarians; while Ruthenian loyalty to the new state cannot be blindly counted upon. A defensive alliance with Rumania and Jugoslavia to prevent the resurrection of Hungarian military power was a logical move. A convention was signed with Jugoslavia on August 13, 1920, and when its value was demonstrated by the part it played to prevent the restoration of Emperor Charles to the throne of Hungary, Rumania joined the “Little Entente” on April 23, 1921.

Rumania, despite her exposed position, had to enter into the Entente counter-revolutionary conspiracies against Russia because she depended upon Entente indorsement to legalize and defend her annexation of Bessarabia. Greece had gone into the ill fated French military venture in South Russia because France insisted upon this as the price of supporting Greek claims to Thrace. Poland allowed herself to be used from the beginning against the Bolshevists because she was infeudated to French policy and could look for large territorial gains as a price of coÖperation. But Czechoslovakia, although her spectacular Legion had done much to help the Allied Powers against the Bolshevists in eastern Russia and Siberia, refused flatly to keep up hostilities against the Moscow Soviet, once independence was assured. The new state turned a deaf ear to all persuasion. The Prague Government went to the length of following the example of Germany by proclaiming and forcing strict neutrality when Poland and Soviet Russia were at war. A howl went up in France in the summer of 1920 when the Czechs took the same stand as the British High Commissioner at Danzig, and forbade the transit of war material destined to Poland.

The Czechoslovak Government is frankly anti-Communist and has no sympathy with the Moscow doctrines. But the Czechoslovaks are not enemies of the Russians, like the Poles and the Rumanians, and they consider Bolshevism a temporary misfortune and not a crime for which the Russians are to be punished and despoiled of territories. Before the Genoa Conference Dr. Benes notified the Entente Powers and the United States that Czechoslovakia intended to make an agreement with Soviet Russia. This was done, notwithstanding French and American disapproval.

At the time Dr. Benes explained Czechoslovakia’s attitude to me as follows: “The United States can afford to take the attitude of complete non-intercourse with Moscow. But we cannot. We have our security to think of, and we want to be prepared for the trade opportunities that will open up in the future as Russia becomes stable again. Russia is one of our most promising markets. We must have a delegation at Moscow, to know what is going on in Russia, and to be ready for trade when it offers itself. Our struggle for existence, economically and politically, is such that we must think of the future and take Russia into our calculations.”

No country deplores more the weakness of the League of Nations and is more alarmed over what we might term international anarchy than Czechoslovakia. With her composite population and her peculiar geographic position, with impossible frontiers from the strategic point of view, she is eager for some permanent assurance of international political stability. There are only about six million Czechs. Even with the Slovaks, they number scarcely eight millions. Czechoslovakia could not exist if the Germans of Bohemia went to Germany and the Hungarians of Slovakia to Hungary. It is natural, then, that security of frontiers, based upon international agreement rather than upon force or precarious alliances, is the goal of the Czechoslovak diplomacy. This explains the move of Dr. Benes at the Genoa Conference in the summer of 1922, when he tried to get the powers to accept the most elementary of all principles, that of a universal and binding compact of non-aggression. The Czechoslovaks, not being able to defend their state, and fearing to have the defense of the treaties to which they owe their existence depend upon armies and alliances, have proposed universal and reciprocal declaration of the sanctity of frontiers, and want the League of Nations to become an automatic proscriber of any nation disturbing the status quo of the Paris peace settlement.

When we estimate the chances of long life for so curiously formed a state as Czechoslovakia, we have no other grounds for assuming its durability than the adoption of a program like that advocated by Dr. Benes at Genoa. If the Germans all get together none can prevent them from snuffing the life out of Czechoslovakia, especially if they are able to form once more an alliance with Hungary. Italy alone could put obstacles in the path of such a program, provided there is no world organization to maintain the frontiers of the Paris treaties.