Page:Bohemia; a brief evaluation of Bohemia's contribution to civilization (1917).pdf/11

 who thus became numerous and powerful in Bohemia. Their successors today are determined to keep the native Bohemians from governing their own country.

Finally, in 1867 the dual monarchy, Austria-Hungary, was constituted; but Bohemia was studiously prevented from a just share in freedom. By a long series of unjust measures and policies the Czechs were divided between Austria and Hungary; were cheated of their equitable representation in the diet of Bohemia and in that of the Empire; were kept a subject race.

And these injustices, dating centuries back in their origin, have made possible the Pan-German scheme of a Prussian Middle Europe, the ruthless attack on Serbia, the brutal war of German aggression on the civilization of the world. Bohemia, free and autonomous in the Austrian monarchy, would have made these calamaties impossible.

Remember that the Bohemians had no voice in bringing on this war. The war was made by the autocratic monarch; there was no meeting of the Austrian parliament from the spring of 1914 until the spring of 1917. Even then the fantastic injustice of the composition of the elective Austrian lower house is seen in the choice of a rabid Pan-German presiding officer by a vote of 215 to 195. Austria has a population of 10,000.000 Germans and 18,000.000 non-Germans.

So these old European wrongs in the end have endangered the freedom of the world, and have dragged America into the war maelstrom. The world will not be safe until the ancient wrongs are redressed. The Czecho-Slovaks, in Bohemia and Silesia and Moravia, must be free, within Austria or out of it. Then there will be a dike against the Pan-German flood against which its waves will dash in vain. Freedom and justice in central Europe will mean freedom and safety in the remotest parts of the earth.