Page:The voice of an oppressed people.pdf/59

Rh ern Slavs were utterly neglected, and though in Dalmatia the Croat language was introduced into the administration, this was done not to satisfy the Slav majority, but simply to annoy the Italian minority. Trieste was invaded by Viennese and Berlin capital—Trieste, which not less than Prague, is coveted by the Pangermans as the starting-point for Suez and the East. The anti-Slav policy of the Magyars is too notorious to require special treatment here. King Milan's policy is an illustration of how the Austrians are willing to extend toleration to the Balkan Slavs, when they accept thraldom.

This anti-Slav policy culminated, after the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in unreasoning hostility to Serbia, and the present war is its logical outcome—the continuation of the policy inaugurated by the mediaeval Empire.

Though essentially anti-Slav, the Pangermanism of Germany and Austria-Hungary threatens the Western nations in Africa and Asia, and has welded together Slavs, Latins, and British. In this vast struggle the place of the Czecho-Slovaks can only be on the side of the Slavs and of the Western nations; not only their geographical position, but their whole historical development and national programme forces them to join those who have proclaimed as their aim the respect for nationalities and liberation of all nations, great and small, the crushing of Prussian militarism, and consequently the inner regeneration of Europe as a whole. The national ideals of Bohemia and her Reformation are unrealisable in Austria-Hungary, where the organisation of Brute Force secures to the minority the means of exploiting the majority. Bohemia can never accept the ideal of Prussia and Germany, which would enslave the world by military drill and Machiavellian misuse of science and culture. The German is a strange mixture of the schoolmaster and the bully; he first knocks his opponent down and then gives him a lecture and a sermon.