Page:Bohemia – The Submerged Front.pdf/4

Rh ality upon which the Bohemians and the Slovaks, be it said to their credit, will admit of no compromise. How often I have heard them say in their meetings, both here and in their native land: "Yes, we have put up for centuries with unfair taxation which has taken away our lands and robbed us of our goods. We have given up our sons to fill their armies because we had no arms with which to resist and because we were always promised that they would not be used in a war or in a cause in which we did not believe. But our language, the words that we learned in childhood, which we drank in with our mothers' milk, which binds us for time and eternity to all we cherish and prize; no, you shall not take our language away; you shall not choke the expression of our souls."

At the outbreak of the war Bohemians were paying more than four hundred million crowns annually in taxes to Austria. The imposition of the war taxes has, of course, increased this tribute very largely. All, or very nearly all, this money is staying in Vienna and is used, in so far as it is used at all for purposes that can be named and recorded, to develop the Austrian Alpine lands which are largely unproductive. And in the meantime the clearest and most elementary needs of Bohemia are igored or neglected. If they wish to have anything done, the unfortunate Bohemians needs must go down into their pockets and pay for the desired improvement with personal contributions. And still, in spite of all this unfair treatment, the Bohemians stand at the head of all the Austrian nationalities in the matter of education. Less than four per cent of their people are illiterate, while among the Magyars, who dominate the situation, and help to misrule them, the ratio of illiteracy reaches nearly forty per cent.

It is impossible to estimate even roughly the millions of crowns that this unfortunate people have been compelled to spend every year in private schools, by means of which they have sought and have succeeded in preserving their Bohemian children from Germanization.

I spent a week in Bohemia in 1915, and I think I came away from there with my saddest memories of the great catastrophe. Here indeed lies prostrate in stark misery a mourning nation. Her sons are scattered or dead, their leaders are in prison or in exile; her daughters mourn by the side of the freshly-turned graves. In Prague still stands