Page:Czecho-Slovaks (1917).djvu/6

 the following centuries to the head waters of the Oder, and along the Danube to the very confines of the Hungarian plain. German settlers and Germanised Slavs in Silesia became in the Middle Ages a barrier between the main bodies of Poland and of Bohemia. Germans and Magyars on the Danube separated the Czecho-Slovaks from the Jugo-Slavs. But in its mountainous quadrilateral the Czech nation has stood out against the German flood, a Slav bastion in the West, taking part and even taking the lead in the intellectual movements of Europe.

In 1349 Prague became the seat of one of the earliest universities of Central Europe, and within less than fifty years the Czechs, centring round the University of Prague, came forward as forerunners and champions of freedom of thought in Europe. Huss and the Hussite movements were the first great contribution of the Czecho-Slovaks to the world’s history. The movement, like everything in the Middle Ages, was on its surface predominantly religious, yet religion was deeply tinged by nationality. The growing consciousness of nationalism in religion was one of the mainsprings of the Reformation, the Reformation being among other things the protest of the European nationalities attaining full consciousness of their own individuality, against the inherited universality of Rome. It was therefore by no means an accident that the first protest of national individualism and the first cry for national freedom of action and individual freedom of thought had come from Bohemia. Threatened by the Germans, who had behind them the authority of the Holy Roman Empire of German nationality, the Czechs