onage. Instead of paying its own way, it has been
financially a heavy drag upon the State, while racially it provides, in the
Polish-Ruthene conflict, an object-lesson on the disagreeable fact that
an oppressed race can become an oppressor when occasion arises. But the
argument which weighs most with the Germans of Austria is that the Poles
of Galicia have for a whole generation held in their hands the political
balance in the Austrian Parliament, and that the disappearance of
the Polish and Ruthene deputies would destroy the Slav majority and
correspondingly strengthen the Germans. The Magyars in their turn would no
doubt view with some alarm the extension of the Russian frontier to the
line of the Carpathians; but the change would bring to them certain obvious
compensations, since it would greatly increase the relative importance of
Hungary inside what was left of the Habsburg Monarchy. In short, it is
by no means impossible that if the Russians succeed in holding Galicia,
Austria-Hungary may show a sudden alacrity to buy peace by disgorging a
province which has never wholly fitted into her geographical or political
system.

It is obvious that the fate of the small province of Bukovina is bound up
with that of Galicia; and in such circumstances as we have just indicated,
it would doubtless be divided between Russia and Roumania on broad
ethnographical lines, the northern districts being Ruthene, the southern
Roumanian. This, however, must depend upon the attitude of the kingdom of
Roumania, to which reference will be made later.

There is one other direction in which Austria could afford to surrender
territory, without serious loss save that of prestige. The southern portion
of Tirol--the so-called Trentino, the district round the town of Trent--is
purely Italian by race, and its union with the kingdom of Italy has long
been the chief point in the programme of the Italian Irredentists or
extreme Nationalists. It is a poor and mountainous country, which belongs
geographically to its southern rather than to its northern neighbour. The
pronouncedly Italian sympathies of its inhabitants have complicated the
problem of government and have been a permanent source of friction between
Austria and Italy. The elaborate fortifications along the existing frontier
would have to be sacrificed, but the new racial frontier could soon be made
equally satisfactory from a strategic point of view. It should then be
borne in mind that at