Even in the event of only relative failure on the part of Austria-Hungary a much more radical solution may be expected, while the effect of her complete defeat would be to place the solution of the whole “Austrian problem” in the hands of the Entente Powers and of her own disaffected populations.  In that case there are two probable alternatives, one more radical than the other.  Both depend to a large extent upon the development of the military situation and upon as yet incalculable economic influences, but it is possible to indicate their broad outlines.  Indeed, this is the best means of illustrating the conflicting fears and aspirations which the great conflict has still further intensified in the racial whirlpool of Central Europe.  Let us consider the less drastic of the two first.

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.