succeeded in concentrating all government and administration in their own hands and reducing the other races of the country, who have always formed a majority of the population, to a state of veritable political helotry.  And just as their evolution has been on very different lines, so must be their future fate.  In Bohemia all is activity and political progress, in Hungary the sterility of a corrupt and reactionary system, staking the future upon the hollow credit of a long-vanished past.  The Czechs are beyond all question the most progressive, the most highly civilised, the most democratic of all Slavonic nations.  The stubborn spirit of John Hus is still alive among them to-day, and their recent achievements in music, art, and industry are in every way worthy of the nation which has produced Comenius and Dvorak and first lit the torch of Reformation in Europe.  The ancient city of Prague contains all the elements of culture necessary for the regeneration of Bohemia, and the mineral riches and industrial resources of the country are infinitely greater than those of many European States which have successfully led a separate national existence.

But the liberation of the Czechs would not be complete unless their close kinsmen the Slovaks were included in the new Bohemian State; and every reason alike of politics, race, and geography tells overwhelmingly in favour of such an arrangement.  The Slovaks, who would to the last man welcome the change, have long suffered from the gross tyranny of Magyar rule.  Their schools and institutions have been ruthlessly suppressed or reduced in numbers, their press muzzled, their political development arrested, their culture and traditions—­far more truly autochthonous than those of the conquering Magyar invaders—­have been discouraged and hampered at every turn.  The Slovaks are a race whose artistic and musical gifts, whose innate sense of colour and poetry have won the sympathy and admiration of all who know them; and their systematic oppression at the hands of the Magyar oligarchy is one of the greatest infamies of the last fifty years.  In this war Britain has proclaimed herself the champion of the small nations, and none are more deserving of her sympathy than the Slovaks.  Unless our statesmen renounce that principle of nationality which they have so loudly proclaimed, the Slovaks cannot be abandoned to their fate; for they form an essential part of the Bohemian problem.  Without them the new kingdom could not stand alone, isolated as it would be among hostile or indifferent neighbours.  In every way the Slovak districts form the natural continuation of Bohemia and are the necessary link between it and Russia, upon whose moral support the new State must rely in the first critical years of its existence.