Page:The New Europe (The Slav standpoint), 1918.pdf/56

 (among them, Comenius) were exiled from the country, and four-fifths of the soil was confiscated and given in reward to military adventurers and noblemen, who gathered from all Europe, like vultures, and divided the Bohemian booty. A large part of the Bohemian property was taken by the Emperor himself. The people were made Catholic with the help of the dragoons and Jesuits; but the national consciousness was not extinguished; the spirit of opposition was not broken—the peasants of Moravia fought against the imperial army as late as 1775.

Maria Theresa and Joseph II. were the first rulers who dared to establish governmental departments, but it was Joseph who provoked, also, a strong national movement and political opposition in Bohemia (and also in Hungary). After the proclamation of the Austrian Empire (1804), giving expression to absolutist unification, the opposition in Bohemia grew, until, finally, the revolution of 1848 compelled Ferdinand (April 4, 1848) to declare a partial restoration of the Bohemian constitution and independence. Bach’s absolutism introduced centralisation once more. At the beginning of the constitutional era, made necessary by the defeat of 1859, Emperor Francis Joseph vacillated between centralisation and federalisation, but leaned more and more toward centralisation; in 1861 he promised the Czechs, with whom the Germans of Bohemia were at that time at one, that he would be crowned King of Bohemia; in the same year he promised a Slovak delegation freedom and support against the Magyars.

But the promises were never fulfilled. The defeat of 1866 compelled the dynasty to grant concessions, but those concessions that would weaken absolutism the least; the emperor reached an agreement in 1867 with Hungary, or, rather, with the Magyars, by which he granted hegemony to the Germans in Austria and to the Magyars in Hungary. The Czechs opened a radical constitutional opposition by their well-known passive resistance, boycotting the Central Parliament. Emperor Francis Joseph took a personal share in this struggle, and attempted to crush the opposition by force and by the grossest violation of law, but in vain. And so he made an attempt to reach an agreement with the Czechs. He twice issued a rescript to the Bohemian Diet (1870–1871), in which he promised that he would assume the Bohemian Crown, and in which he recognised the historical rights of the Bohemian State, but the Magyars and Prussians, as was recently re-confirmed by the Hungarian Premier, Eszterhazy, prevented the consummation of the agreement. Again the Czech nation fought against Vienna, until, in 1879, the fight ended in a compromise, which guaranteed the Czechs certain cultural and national concessions (for instance, the University), but the struggle for the rights of the Bohemian State was not settled. The Czechs did not recognise the centralistic constitution of Austria, and took part in the work of the central parliament only under the reservation of their State rights.

Such is the state of things even to-day. Austria having been transformed into the dual State of Austria-Hungary, represents the organised violence of the German minority in Austria and the Magyar minority in Hungary. From the legal point of view, dualism is disloyalty, and actually a conspiracy of the dynasty with the Germans and Magyars against the Czechs; Austria came into existence by the union of not merely Austria and Hungary but of the two States with the Bohemian State. As a matter of fact, the Czechs are just as fully entitled to independence as the Magyars; or, rather, more so, for when Bohemia united with Austria, in 1526, Hungary, as noted above, was overrun by the Turks, only Slovakia being free.