A BETRAYAL OF DEMOCRACY
December 21, 1917
President Wilson has announced that we are in this war to make the world safe for democracy. Either this declaration was worse than empty rhetoric or we are in honor bound to make it good. Indeed, to prove false to it now is to be guilty of peculiarly offensive hypocrisy.
The only way to make the world safe for democracy is to free the people over whom Turkey and Austria tyrannize. Every day’s delay in declaring war on Austria, Turkey, and Bulgaria has represented and now represents a betrayal of democracy and of our allies. It is hypocritical to send an encouraging message to Rumania and not to declare war on Bulgaria. It is hypocritical to shed crocodile tears over Armenia and not to declare war on Turkey.
When President Wilson says, “We do not wish in any way to rearrange the Austria-Hungarian Empire; it is no affair of ours what they do,†he is engaged in the betrayal of democracy, and if his present words are to be taken seriously, then his declaration about making the world safe for democracy was false and empty rhetoric. Either one statement or the other must be unsparingly condemned by all honest men. In view of the last statement there is small wonder that the Austrian Foreign Minister says that “it is to our interest to nail down†the statement in question, because it abandons the proposal, or, as the Austrian minister phrases it, “the catch phrase,†to allow all small states to determine their own destinies. No wonder that the leading Vienna paper contemptuously states that President Wilson wishes to act as an “European peace intermediary,†being one of the leaders who “apparently consider a warlike noise the best overture to a peace conference.â€
There is also no wonder that the Czech Slovaks feel with intense bitterness about this betrayal. One of their papers in this country describes how loyally they have supported America and the Allies, and describes the dreadful butcheries and persecutions of their men, women, and children in Bohemia, and then asks whether it can be true that America now really proposes to keep them “under the merciless tyranny of the Huns.â€
This is precisely what President Wilson proposes when he says that it is no affair of ours to rearrangethe Austrian-Hungarian Empire, or, in other words, no affair of ours to free the Czechs, Slovaks, Jugo-Slavs, Italians, and Rumanians, who, together with the Poles, make up the majority of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and who are ground down by tyranny of the Germans and the Magyars.
The President’s proposal represents three separate betrayals.
It is the betrayal of the Slavs of Austria, to whose cause our allies have pledged themselves and who form a democratic population oppressed by a militaristic autocracy.
It is the betrayal of democracy, because we abandon the majority who are our friends into the hands of a minority, who despise and hate us.
It is the betrayal of the free people everywhere to Germany, for Germany is now a world menace, chiefly because Austria and Turkey are her subject allies, and President Wilson’s proposal is to leave them undisturbed.
A peace without a change of frontiers and without indemnification for brutal wrongdoing, a peace which does not create an independent and united Poland and a greater Bohemia and Jugo-Slovak commonwealth, as well as a greater Italy and a greater Rumania, and which does not free and indemnify Belgium, would leave every perilous problem of Europe unsolved. It would be timid and calamitous folly to refuse to touch the disputed questions which, if left unanswered, are absolutely certain to invite a future war.