NEWS OF THE WEEK
THE Nazification of Austria is being carried through with relentless precision. Arrests continue, the latest public figures to be placed in confinement including General Vaugoin, the former Austrian Minister, and the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Jewish shopkeepers are being systematic- ally expropriated, ant -measures against Jews in the profes- sions being progressively applied. Relative harmony, on the other hand, appears to exist between the Roman Catholic Church in Austria and the new rulers, the Austrian bishops (to be supported, it is said, by the German bishops) having agreed to advise their followers to vote " Yes " in the coming plebiscite in return for assurances of a full guarantec of the rights of God and the Church. Herr Hitler's periodical plebiscites are a psychological curiosity. Having regard to the conditions under which they are held they are utterly meaningless, they are bound to be meaningless and everyone knows they are meaningless. The forms of democracy have a strange fascination for authoritarians, who never cease to pro- claim their contempt for its reality. Meanwhile next door to Austria, in Czechloslovakia, democratic discussions are taking place in a free Parliament on the treatment of the country's minorities, particularly, of course, the Sudetendeutsch. The suggestion that the Slovaks too are demanding autonomy is `lased on the equivocal attitude of the always equivocal Father Hlinka, but he has behind him less than half the Slovak deputies in the Chamber. Conversations between the Government and the Sudetendeutsch seem probable.
* * * *
