THE NEW BALTIC STATE.
AS the situation in regard to the three Baltic Provinces was left after the signing of the Peace of Brost, Germany had disclaimed any intention of annexing Livonia or Esthonia (The Chancellor in the Reichstag, February 2ah, 1918), but Russia under- took to refrain from all interference in the two Provinces, and " to let Germany and Austria decide tho future fate of these territories in agreement with their populations " (Brest Treaty, Art, 111. 2), and occupy them " until their security is guaranteed
by their own national institutions" (Brest Treaty, 'Art. VI.). Courland was definitely separated from Russia (Brest Treaty, Art. III.), Germany reserving a final decision as to its future political form (The Chancellor in the Reichstag, March 18th, 1918). A month later, at the end of April, 1918, the Chancellor made public an announcement that Germany had agreed to the formation of " one united monarchic constitutional State, with a common constitution and administration," to bo " formed out of Courland, Livonia, Esthonia, the adjoining islands, and the city of Riga." No more important act of State has proceeded from the Central Powers since the famous Manifesto of the Two Emperors to the Poles on November 5th, 1916. It remains to be seen whether its subsequent history will be as chequered.
In the scant notices which have reached the English Press with regard to the situation in the new Baltic State, and the attitude of its component peoples, confusion has arisen owing to the use of the word " Diet " for several very different bodies. The Dicta which existed before the war, four in number, representing Courland, Livonia, Esthonia, and the island of Oesel, were the last political relic of the once absolute domination of the German minority in the three Provinces. Fifty years ago the Balls— so the German element is called—under the Russian Governor- General, held in their hands practically the entire administration of the country. The Baltic Provinces were then an agricultural country, with small and decaying handicraft industries in the towns. The conditions were mediaeval, and the administration was mediaeval. The Diets, representing the Ritterschaften, the almost exclusively Cerman landowning class (eighty per cent. of the large landowners in Courland are German, and ninety per cent. in Esthonia and Livonia), ruled the land, and the Town Councils, as exclusively German as the Diets, ruled the towns. Neither had jurisdiction in the sphere of the other. Each appointed a eaten of officials, in the higher ranks mostly unpaid, Judges who administered German (Baltic) Law, teachers in the schools, and pastors in the Lutheran Church. The Baits thus richly privileged were amongst the most loyal, as they were amongst the most efficient, subjects of the Tsar. As for the other races who inhabited these parts, tho Esths and the Letts, representing between them some four-fifths of the entire population, they had no voice. They were just beginning to want to find a voice.
In the " seventies " and " eighties " of the last century the Russian Government, under the influence of one of those waves of Pan-Slav enthusiasm which periodically move across the mighty —they are still mighty—Russian deeps, set on foot a policy of thoroughgoing Russification in the Baltic Provinces. ,Unre- mittingly applied, this policy had before the war come near to stripping the Belts, not indeed of their crushing social predominance —for that is based on economic factors, primarily on their ownership of the land—but of almost all their political privilege. The Russian bureaucratic system was introduced in town and country. Tiro Russian Criminal Code was substituted for the mediaeval Baltic Law. The primary schools were taken out of the hands of pastor and Ritter, the (German) secondary schools were Russified, and the admirable University of Dorpat (an institution with a past and an individuality as distinguished and as distinctive as Trinity, Dublin, with which in other respects, too, it had not a little in common) was closed, emptied of its students and professors, and reopened as a colourless and inefficient Russian High School under a new name. (It was called Juriew.) In the towns the Russian Municipal Constitution was early introduced ; and in the freely elected Municipal Assemblies—the Russian Municipal Constitution is on very democratic lines—the proud and wealthy German Stadtvater found themselves forced for the first time to admit the despised Letts to their councils. In the large towns they have been able, not without difficulty, to maintain their ascendancy, for their prestige is still great ; in the smaller towns they have for the most part been swamped, or, as the expression runs in Baltieum, rerlettet. Only the Diets remained as a rallying- point of Ballentum, shorn of the realities of power and hampered in every direction by the veto of Russian tchinorniki, but in their constitution still untouched. The Ritterechaften dared not attempt reform from within ; for in any attempt at reform the Russian bureaucracy would assuredly have taken a hand, and whoever might have benefited by the change, it would• not have been the Gel mans. In truth, they suited the Russian programme best as they were; it was easier to leave them to decay from their own weakness than to substitute for them a genuine popular Assembly, the majority of which would on any sort of franchise be composed of Letts and Esths, most of them belonging to the extreme wing of Revolutionary Social Democracy. So the Diets survived until the war, and indeed until the German occupation, by which time the Baits had lost all the love they ever had for Mother Rustic'. In September last the Courland Diet, at the instigation of the occupying authorities, called a National Assembly at Mitau. The famous July Resolution of the Reichstag on war aims was barely two months old ; it was clear that " self-determination " was likely to play an important part in the peace negotiations ; and it was felt that it might be convenient to have in being a representative body, a suitable representative body, ready to " determine " itself when the time should come. The Diet could not with decency be cast for the role of a representative body, So a Courland National Assembly was convoked. It was con- stituted as follows. Of eighty representatives, thirty-one represented the big landowners (mostly—eighty per cent.— German), twenty-seven the rural Communes (exclusively Lett), seventeen the towns, four the Lutheran Church, one the Roman Catholic Church. On the rural Communes, of which the Ritter are not members, the Lettish landowning peasants, the so-called Wirte, have a dominating voice. The Wirte are labourers who have availed themselves of the land purchase facilities, which have been in existence—originally, it is fair to state, on the initiative, of the Ritterschaften in the Diets—since the " sixties " of the last century. They hold in Courland 38.1 per cent. of the land, while the Ritter hold 41.6 per cent. They are thrifty and hard-working, and before the war and the ravages committed by the retreating Russian armies in 1915 were a prosperous class. The Socialist Letts in the towns hate them ; they used to call them the " Grey Barons," because, they said, they were nearly as bad as the " Black Barons "(the Ritter). They are only a minority (thirty or forty per cent.) of the Lettish agricultural population. The majority (sixty or seventy per cent.) are labourers (Knechte), who are in the same position as the English agricultural labourer or worse. They have no land of their own, and are only represented indirectly (one representative for ten votes) on the Communes, whereas the Wirte have direct representation. Besides the representatives of the Communes, some of the seventeen representatives of the towns can probably be regarded as representing the Letts. The rest, with the exception of the representative of the Roman Catholic Church (who was there to speak for the Lithuanian immigrants, an inde- pendent element, not generally pro-Lett), may be considered to represent the Balt minority. It was not therefore an ideal franchise for a " representative body," though it was a better than Courland in all her previous history had ever known.
The proceedings, which were brief, were in German. The Assembly declared itself the legitimate representative of Courland ; it asked for German protection, and it asserted the " natural unity " of all the three Provinces. It then appointed a National Council (Landrat or Landesrat, the accounts vary as to the name) of twenty members to represent the Province on all future occasions, and dissolved. It is with this body, which may be compared with the Council of State in Poland or the Read van Vlaandoren in Belgium, that the Germans have subsequently dealt. The Council seems at one stage to have offered the Ducal crown to the Emperor William as King of Prussia ; but the settlement for which it has throughout pressed, and which, as has already been indicated, was ultimately adopted, was the maintenance of the traditional unity of the three Provinces, the cement of which is, and—if the unity of the Provinces is to be preserved— perhaps can only be, the German element which alone is commor4 to all three. The trouble is that tho non-German elements, or large sections of them, do not wish the unity of the Provinces to be preserved.
When the Germans occupied Courland in 1915, large numbers of the Letts fled before the invader into Russia. It was out of these refugees that the Lettish Battalions were originally formed. The last Russian Census gave Courland a population of six hundred and seventy-four thousand. A German Census, taken in September, 1915, gave only two hundred and thirty thousand. So greatly was the population diminished. Amongst others, the political leaders, and particularly those of the powerful Socialist Parties, the majority of whom sympathize with the Bolshevists, were mostly gone. Those who remained—it is not quite clear in what proportion the bourgeois and Socialist elements wore represented in their ranks—were profoundly alarmed at the prospect of the meeting of the National Assembly, and the antecedent probability that it would give the go-by to the Nationalist solution which they desire. In order, before it met, to put on record these desires, they asked leave of the German occupying authorities to hold a Lett Conference. The authorities were at first apparently nervous, and refused permission ; but they are particularly anxious to avoid what they call " Irish " conditions in the new State, and there are signs that, coming as strangers to the country, they are somewhat aghast at the hatred with which the Baits are regarded. After some hesitation they agreed to the holding of the Lett Conference, and the Conference was accordingly held in July, 1917. Its first act was to protest against any form of union of the three Provinces in one State, on the ostensible ground of Esth-Lett differences ; it proposed to carve out a Lett State from what may be called Lettland (South Livonia, Courland, and Lattgalia, in which the Letts constitute seventy-five per cent. of the population), for which it claimed " self-determination " at the expiry of one year. The new State was to bo neutral under an international guarantee.
A similar body met at the same time (July, 1917) at Reval. It was composed of seventy Esths, elected on democratic lines by the Esth population under the autonomy which the first Russian Revolutionary Government had granted to the Esths in April, 1917. It declared for the erection of an autonomous State within
the boundaries of Russia, to include what may be called Esthland (Esthonia and the Esth parts of North Livonia, in which the Esths constitute ninety per cent. of the population). Esth and Russian were declared the official languages. Having sat for a single day, it appointed a National Council and dissolved.
The Esthonian and Livonian Ritterschaften would have nothing to do with this body, and were disposed to play a part of their
own. Early in 1918 their two Diets formally denounced the connexion with Russia, and at the same time appealed to Germany for protection. After the German lightning occupation of Livonia and Esthonia at the end of February, 1918, as a sequel to M. Trotsky's rejection of the German peace terms at Brest, the old Diets were tacitly replaced, at the instigation of the German occupying authorities, by two National Assemblies on the Courland model, which met at Riga and Reval in April, 1918, and dissolved after appointing two National Councils for Livonia and Esthonia respectively. The way was then clear. The two National Councils formally proclaimed their independence of Russia, their communica- tion being conveyed through the German Chancellor to M. Joffe, the Russian Representative in Berlin, at the latter's request.
The four National Councils of Courland, Livonia, Esthonia, and Oesel (in which last, too, tho Diet scams to have been replaced by a National Council) then addressed a Joint Petition to the German Emperor, asking for the fusion of all the Provinces in a single Baltic State, connected by military and economic treaties with the German Empire. To this Petition the Chancellor in April, 1918, made the reply which has been referred to -in the opening paragraph of this article.
The first Esth National Council (the one appointed by the Conference of Esths in April, 1917) protested in advance against
the holding of the National Assemblies under German auspices, and bitterly attacked the union of the three Provinces on the ground of Esth-Lett differences. This National Council recently cent a delegation to France, Italy, and Great Britain, all of which Powers have now recognized it as representing, in Mr. Balfour's words, " a de facto independent body " with " informal diplomatic representatives " in London and Paris. Tho new body offers points of analogy with M. Roman Dmowski's Polish National Committee.
All the above-mentioned Assemblies, Councils, and Conferences are commonly referred to in the English Press—when they receive any notice at all—as " Diets." Whence the confusion, which it
is hoped this article may help to clarify. 0. DE L.
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