Austria, as distinguished from Hungary, consists of seventeen provinces,
of which Galicia is the largest and most populous; yet there are many
Austrians who have long regarded its possession as anything but an unmixed
blessing for the Monarchy as a whole, and would scarcely regret its loss.
It has always occupied a peculiar autonomous position of its own; its
political, social, and economic conditions are at least a century behind
those of the neighbouring provinces, and have given rise to many gross
scandals. It has been a hot-bed of agrarian unrest, electoral corruption,
and international espionage. 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.
