Page:Bohemia – The Submerged Front.pdf/2

Rh The lands of the ancient Bohemian crown occupy the northwest corner of Austria. Bohemia proper is over twenty thousand square miles in extent, with 7,000,000 inhabitants. To the east lies the Margravate of Moravia, with 8,500 square miles, and with about two and a half million inhabitants. Adjoining lies the duchy of Silesia, 2,000 square miles in extent, and a million inhabitants, overwhelmingly Bohemian in blood, tradition, language and aspirations. It is not a new thing that this harassed people should stand in the way of German expansion to the east, as they are doing today. For more than a thousand years their lands have been a bone of contention between Slav and Teuton. Since early in the fifth century, when the Bohemian kingdom was most probably established, hardly a generation has passed but that their national existence has been endangered and their homes given over to fire and sword at the hands of the German invaders. At the end of the Thirty Years' War, Bohemia was spoken of as a well-nigh uninhabited wilderness, and its revival from this low ebb to their present position of power is an indication of the vitality of a noble race.

It was in 1526 that the Czechs made their never-sufficiently-to-be-deplored blunder of electing the reigning Hapsburg of the day to be king of Bohemia. In 1618 the people revolted, but two years later, meeting with a decisive defeat at the battle on the White Mountain, they lost their independence. Since then, Bohemia has been governed as a conquered province and the authorities in Vienna have made but little concealment of their purpose to root out the Bohemian language and to settle the country with German colonies wherever possible.

In the very early days of the reign of Francis Joseph the Czechs of the crownlands formulated their demands, of which they had not abated one jot through nearly three hundred years of persecution; they insisted not only upon their rights to live as free individuals, but as a free people. Unfortunately, the young emperor decided that they must become Germans. This unsolved question, and one that is insoluble except in the right way, has been a thorn in the side of the Austrian Emperor ever since. The Bohemians have always been opposed to the Triple Alliance and to those close, almost vassal-like relations with Germany, which the Austrian-Germans and the Magyars for obviously selﬁsh reasons favored. Nowhere was the full significance of the