Prussia or Germany?
Prussia or Germany? is an article written by J. R. F. published in The Daily Chronicle on 9 december 1915.
Prussia or Germany?
To the Editor Daily Chronicle.
Sir, — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's suggestion regarding the "ventilation" of ideas for the ultimate resettlement of Europe on a peaceful basis is a good one, and I hope "The Daily Chronicle" will follow it up. Foreign Office officials are not, as a rule, fertile in ideas, and there is a real danger lest that lack of knowledge and of sympathy which made the Congress of Vienna settlement so unsettling in many respects may again prevail at the next Congress.
I do not see that Austria has any real claim on Silesia, which is entirely cut off from Austria proper by a broad belt of Tchechs, Moravians and Slovaks. Those people, highly cultivated and progressive, are entitled to every sympathy in their present terrible sufferings and persecution, and in the coming settlement an independent Bohemia might well extend to the Oder on the north-east, the remainder of Silesia going to the regenerated Poland.
It is on the west and north that Prussia will have to make the most ample restitution for her flagrant thefts in 1866, Prussia as apart from Germany, that is to say, for, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle reminds us, they are two very different things. The taking of Silesia after all was condoned by Austria at the Congress of Vienna, but the violent incorporation of Hanover, of Hesse Cassel, of Nassau, of Frankfort, of Holstein and of Schleswig were sheer acts of highway robbery and of no international validity. Schleswig was never a part of the Empire; Holstein was. The former ought, therefore, to go back to Denmark, whilst the latter, on the race basis, would resume its old status as a Duchy of Germany — not, of course, of Prussia. Hanover, the Hesse Duchies and Frankfort, seized and annexed by brute force, ought to become once more independent. I knew something of these States in the seventies and eighties, and I can testify to the strong anti-Prussian sentiment that still prevailed there.
As regards Holstein and the Rhine provinces, it may, of course, be necessary for European safety to override, to some extent, racial affinities, but for the rest the freeing of old and well-defined German States from Prussian usurpation — violent and illegal as it was — ought to be the aim of our statesmen.
- J. R. F.
- Dec. 8, 1915.
