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 Bohemia has in the Middle Ages been the mediator between the West and the East, the South and the North, and it will for a long time remain the mediator between the best German thought and the growing Slavic civilization, if the Germans do not, as in the past, rouse the Slavic antipathies. Of all the Slavs, the Bohemians understood the German ideas best, and Dobrovský and other Bohemian Slavists promoted the Slavic idea by means of the German language. That, of course, can never happen again, for the nationalist life is there permanently established. But there is no reason for racial antagonism in a country where Germans and Slavs have lived together for centuries.