Page:The Slavs among the nations by T G Masaryk.djvu/24

 and intellectual community. He developed the theories of the philosophy of history of the German, Herder, according to which the Latins and the Germans will yield to the Slavs the leading place in civilisation. He came to the conclusion that the Slavs must, above all, work for their intellectual development and must not be content with purely material grandeur.

If Kollar and some of his successors lost themselves in vague dreaming, Palacky, the historian and the greatest Czech statesman of 1848, made use of the most practical means to defend the character and the rights of the Czech nation, as well as everything that made its glory in the past (the Hussite movement). He, too, was a partisan of Slavism, and if he at first supported the notion of an Austria equally just to all races, he soon recognised the meaning of Austro-Hungarian dualism; and, in view of the oppression of the Slav peoples of the Monarchy that results from it, he abandoned his Austro-Slavism, and turned his eyes towards Russia, but without ceasing to defend Czech individuality.

The ideas of PolackyPalacký [sic] have been accepted by