Page:The Czechoslovak Review, vol4, 1920.pdf/14

legislation, are approved unanimously by the National Assembly. For the good of the common country the socialists are willing to defer the radical changes which their program calls for, while the bourgeois parties vote for all measures designed to improve the condition of the workingmen. There may be radical talk and loud threats, but compromise always prevails in the end.

What is true of political life applies also to industrial life. There have been very few strikes in the Czechoslovak Republic during the first year of its existence, and not one big strike. In November there was a strike of foremen and office employees of the steel shops, for in Bohemia, just as in America, a mechanic or laborer is better off than foreman or clerk; but after a few days the strikers went back to work, when the government promised to take up their grievances. The tradesmen closed their shops on November 27 for half a day as a protest against too much government regulation and against favoritism shown to co-operative consumers’ societies of the workingmen. There was also a local flare up in brown coal mines near Most which subsided in three days. As against that coal miners all over the Republic held meetings in which they pledged themselves to work seven days a week, until the coal shortage was over. There is a decided increase apparent in coal production and railroad cars have been obtained from Germany. Minister of Public Works Hampl states that the distress would be almost over early in January. The coal situation was one of the principal reasons for the decision of the government, approved by the National Assembly, to buy out the remaining private railroads of the republic which are in the main coal roads; their total length is 1204 kilometers.

Everyone follows with interest and some anxiety the development of events in Hungary. One would think that the Magyars had enough troubles at home, after what they have gone through during the past year, to have any aggressive designs. But the fact is that the present government of premier Huszar pursues the same policy as Karolyi and the bolsheviks, namely restoring Magyar rule over the entire areca of the former kingdom of Hungary. While Huszar is publicly making professions of peacefulness and submission, Horthy, the former commander of the Austro-Hungarian navy, is strengthening his army and posting it on the Slovak boundary. Billboards in hungry Budapest are again covered with chauvinistic appeals to fight for an integral Hungary, and an active propaganda is carried on abroad pretending that the liberated races of former Hungary clamor to be put back under Magyar rule. Bolshevik agitators are released from prison, when they promise to go to Slovakia or Transylvania to make trouble, and Magyar squires in these provinces conspire with the monarchists of Budapest for the restoration of Hapsburg rule or at least of monarchy in some form over the whole former kingdom. There is quite a contrast between Austria and Hungary in this respect; Austria knows it has been licked, but the Magyars have not yet realized that instead of disposing of the armed forces of an empire with fifty million people their strength is limited to the resources of a bankrupt, beggared little country of scarcely eight million people. The Czechoslovaks are not afraid of the military prowess of the Magyars, but they deplore the fact that the existence of a warlike neighbor on the south will make necessary the spending of more money on their military establishment. Unless there is an effective League of Nations in existence, the Czechoslovak Republic will have to be prepared to defend in the field against the Magyars the territory awarded to it by the Peace Conference.

National Assembly was asked in December to grant additional money to the government, to cover a deficiency in the budget for 1919. Like practically every European country, the Czechoslovak Republic is faced with a big deficit. The regular budget approved in May showed a small surplus as between ordinary revenues and expenditures, but extraordinary outlay brought about a deficiency of 3901 million crowns. Now the government came with a statement of 807 million of additional revenue and 1901 million of additional expense. Thus the total deficiency for 1919 is increased to almost five billion crowns. The new deficiency not foreseen at the time