Page:Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919).djvu/218

206 In the opinion of those who know Russia best, autocratic rule of some sort is almost inevitable if she is to depend on her own strength to cope with the Germans.

The Slav and kindred nations which inhabit the borderland between the Germans and the Russians are, however, of a very different calibre. Consider the Czechs: have they not stood proof against Bolshevism and asserted their capacity of nationhood under amazing conditions in Russia? Have they not shown the most extraordinary political capacity in creating anew and maintaining Slav Bohemia, though beset on three sides by Germany and on the fourth side by Hungary? Have they not also made Bohemia a hive of modern industry and a seat of modern learning? They, at any rate, will not lack the will to order and to independence.

Between the Baltic and the Mediterranean you have these seven non-German peoples, each on the scale of a European State of the second rank—the Poles, the Bohemians (Czechs and Slovaks), the Hungarians (Magyars), the South Slavs (Serbians, Croatians, and Slovenes), the Rumanians, the Bulgarians, and the Greeks. Of these, two are among our present enemies—the Magyars and the Bulgarians. But the Magyars and