Page:Czecho-Slovaks (1917).djvu/5

 and, foremost, of the Jugo-Slavs and Poles. But where they themselves hold the line they have decided to hold it strongly and with united forces. Everywhere in the world where the Czechs and Slovaks have created their own organisations the two groups have during this war acted together—in the United States, in South America, in Great Britain, France, and Russia, everywhere where on foreign soil they can work freely for the foundation of their future State. And the eminent Czech statesman who now leads the Czecho-Slovak movement for independence, Professor Masaryk, is himself by birth a Slovak.

In certain ways the Czech nation, as we may call them for short, is unique among the Slavs. It is the only Slav nation that has survived in the very heart of Central Europe, and this is the very reason why it has become the special mark of German hatred and why the Germans have singled it out for the most relentless and untiring attacks. In the early Middle Ages the whole of what we might call the European Middle East was inhabited by Slavs. Their settlements extended from the lower Elbe and the Baltic Sea to the Adriatic and the Ægean. In the ninth century the Magyars, a Mongol tribe closely allied to the Huns and Avars, drove in a wedge between the northern and southern Slav settlements by conquering the wide plains on the middle Danube and the Theiss. Meantime from the west the Germans started to penetrate the Slav territories. (The co-operation of the Teuton Huns and the Magyar Huns is older than is usually thought.) They advanced along the Baltic coast and up the rivers, extending their settlements during