Sec.10. Germany and Austria.—­One final problem 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 losses the chance of making these good by the achievement of national unity would probably sweep away the dissentients, who would no longer represent a triumphant system, but a beaten and discredited caste.  The old idea of the “seventy-million Empire,” which appealed so strongly to the Liberals of Frankfurt in 1848, should prove irresistible under these circumstances.  The influence of Austrian Germans, already so marked in literature, art, music, and above all in political theory, might make itself felt in other spheres also.