And yet the Austrians were only one of several peoples in the Hapsburg Empire who had made common cause with Germany. Statesmen and generals in highest places throughout the war had been Czechs, Poles, and Jugoslavs. With the exception of the Czechs, all the peoples of the Dual Monarchy had fought well throughout the war. It is patent that Austria-Hungary could never have gone through four years of war had not the landed aristocracy, the bankers, and the manufacturers of all the peoples of the empire supported and coöperated with the Vienna Government until the game was clearly up. But, as soon as the armistice was signed, the liberated peoples received immunity, doffed their uniforms and decorations, and asserted that they had been forced to fight against their liberators. This was not true of the great majority of them. The Jugoslavs were always bitter against the Italians. Until the latter part of 1917 the Poles had no kindly feeling for the allies of Russia, while the Austrians were their best friends. The Rumanians, like the Italians, had hesitated about abandoning their neutrality until the bribe had been made sufficiently attractive. At Vienna and Budapest throughout the war the upper classes of subject peoples were heart and soul (or at least acted as if they were!) with the cause of the Central Empires. Only the Czechs--and not the majority of them--had shown themselves disloyal. This was natural. The Dual Monarchy was a system, a complicated system; and the picture painted for us of Germans and Magyars, less than twenty millions; lording it brutally over more than thirty millions of other races is hardly half true. The national antagonism between German and Czech was largely local, and was not remedied by the Treaty of St.-Germain. The Poles were very well off under Austrian rule. Jugoslavs preferred the Germans to the Italians. The great mass of Rumanians in Hungary were better educated, further advanced in self-government, and much more independent economically than the Rumanians in Rumania. The truth is that, with the exception of the Czechs, the various peoples of the Hapsburg Empire were aware of their common economic interests, and saw the advantages of belonging to a great country. Worked upon by irredentist propaganda from the outside, there had been the struggle between culture and pocketbook, with a victory for the latter up to the time of the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire.