Page:Czecho-Slovaks (1917).djvu/4

 whilst the Czechs of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, numbering six and a half millions, at the present day, have fought for the last thousand years against German aggression and suffered from German tyranny, the two and a half million Slovaks who inhabit north-eastern Hungary have had their chief and bitterest enemies in the Magyars. Now when Germans and Magyars are united for life and death in this struggle for dominance over Central Europe, what a joy it must be to them to suggest divisions between their victims! No doubt it would be of advantage to them to weaken that small and isolated Slav nation, which on all its fronts fights against these two dominant races, by dividing it into two separate bodies. Yet at no time was this attempt really likely to succeed. As stated above, the difference between the two branches of the nation is not racial and not even linguistic; it is historic. But then it is an historic difference which points towards union, and after this war will bind the two branches together ever so much more closely. It does not mean any vital division. Historic differences matter where the different traditions imply a difference in the direction of the will, not where they are due to the violence of outside enemies. At all the greatest moments of Czecho-Slovak history the two branches of the nation were one, or at least tried to become one; it was only when crushed by their enemies that they became divided. Even united, they would hardly be a match for the Germans and Magyars, and they are fully conscious of it. They know that liberty is not possible for them or cannot prove durable without the liberty of other sister nations