connected with
Austria-Hungary remains. What is to be the fate of the German provinces of
Austria? If the map of Europe is to be recast on a basis of nationality, we
obviously cannot withhold from the great German nation that right to racial
unity which we accord to the Czechs, the Poles and many minor races. The
seven German provinces--Upper and Lower Austria, Styria, Carinthia, Tirol,
Salzburg and Vorarlberg--reconstituted perhaps as a kingdom of Austria
under the House of Habsburg and augmented by the German population of
western Hungary, would then become an additional federal unit in the German
Empire. Such an event, it cannot be too often repeated, is inconceivable
except as the result of a complete defeat of the central powers, but if on
that assumption Germany loses Alsace-Lorraine and Posen, the loss would be
made good by the incorporation of German Austria. The result of this
in figures would be the subtraction of six million inhabitants and the
addition of eight million others--a transaction which need not unduly alarm
the British Jingo, and at the same time might render defeat less galling to
the German patriot.

Whether this fulfillment of the Pan-German aspiration would meet with
unqualified enthusiasm on either side of the present frontier, is a
question on which it is not altogether easy to answer. The idea of
admitting eight million additional Catholic subjects into Germany would
certainly arouse misgivings in Prussia, both among the stricter Protestants
and among the far more active section of "intellectuals" who merely regard
Protestantism as a political asset in the struggle against Latin and
Slavonic influences. From a political point of view their admission would
unquestionably transform the whole parliamentary situation and force the
Imperial Government to revise its whole attitude; for the Austrian voters
would greatly strengthen the two parties to whose existence Prussia has
never become reconciled--the Clerical Centre and the Social Democratic
Left,--while contributing little or nothing to the parties of the
Conservative Junkers or the middle-class "Liberals." In other words, the
new element might prove to be an effective leaven which would permeate the
whole lump. All the arguments which induced Bismarck to expel Austria
from Germany in 1868 would still be upheld by the advocates of
"Preussen-Deutschland" (see p. 65), and the Prussian hegemony; but after an
unsuccessful war and territorial los