l life
concentrated to a very considerable degree in the German districts, but
this fact is responsible for the existence of important Czech industrial
minorities, which it would be difficult to sacrifice. So far as there is to
be any sacrifice, it must be made by the losers rather than by the winners
in this war. But it ought to be possible, under the rule of some
carefully selected western prince as ruler of Bohemia, to devise proper
administrative guarantees for the linguistic rights of minorities in every
mixed district of Bohemia, whether it be Czech or German. The case of
Hungary is different. That the Allies, if victorious, should perpetuate the
racial hegemony of the Magyars, and with it many of the abuses which have
contributed towards the present war, is as unthinkable as that they should
once more bolster up the Turkish regime. If the Habsburg Monarchy should
break up, Hungary is fully entitled to her independence. She will become a
national Magyar State, but in a sense very different from that which her
Jingo politicians have intended--not by assimilating the non-Magyar races
of the country, but by losing to the other national States by which she
will be surrounded all but the purely Magyar districts of the central
plains. Hungary will then be more fully than before a Danubian State; her
rich alluvial lands will be developed, and a check will be put upon the
unnecessary streams of Magyar emigration which the present political and
economic situation favours. The chief gainer by the change will be the
Magyar peasantry, who have in their own way been exploited by the ruling
oligarchy as cruelly as their non-Magyar neighbours. One result of the war
will be to discredit the policy and methods of this oligarchy and to hasten
the break-up of the vast latifundia of the great magnates and the Church,
and those other drastic land reforms without which Hungary cannot hope to
attain her full economic value as the granary of central Europe. Hitherto
the government of the day has secured a parliamentary majority by
corrupting and terrorising the non-Magyar constituencies of the periphery
and thus out-voting the radical Magyar stalwarts of the great plain; and
with the loss of the Slovak, Ruthene and Roumanian districts this system
would automatically collapse. The result might be a genuine strengthening
of democratic elements and the dawn of a new era for the Magyar race.

Sec.10. _Germany and Austria._--One final problem