The main difficulty would be the fate of racial minorities; for minorities there still must be, no matter how the frontiers may be drawn.  At first sight the natural solution would be to pare down Bohemia by assigning to the neighbouring provinces of Germany the German fringe which almost completely surrounds the Czech kernel.  So far as the south-west and north-east districts of Bohemia (near Budweis and along the German Silesian border) are concerned, the historic boundaries might fairly be revised on ethnographic lines, and in the same way the line of demarcation between Bohemia and Hungary could in the main be made to follow the racial boundary between Slovak and Magyar and later between Slovak and Ruthene.  But in the north of Bohemia there are insurmountable objections to any revision of the historic frontier of the kingdom; for not merely is its industrial life concentrated to a very considerable degree in the German districts, but this fact is responsible for the existence of important Czech industrial minorities, which it would be difficult to sacrifice.  So far as there is to be any sacrifice, it must be made by the losers rather than by the winners in this war.  But it ought to be possible, under the rule of some carefully selected western prince as ruler of Bohemia, to devise proper administrative guarantees for the linguistic rights of minorities in every mixed district of Bohemia, whether it be Czech or German.  The case of Hungary is different.  That the Allies, if victorious, should perpetuate the racial hegemony of the Magyars, and with it many of the abuses which have contributed towards the present war, is as unthinkable as that they should once more bolster up the Turkish regime.  If the Habsburg Monarchy should break up, Hungary is fully entitled to her independence.  She will become a national Magyar State, but in a sense very different from that which her Jingo politicians have intended—­not by assimilating the non-Magyar races of the country, but by losing to the other national States by which she will be surrounded all but the purely Magyar districts of the central plains.  Hungary will then be more fully than before a Danubian State; her rich alluvial lands will be developed, and a check will be put upon the unnecessary streams of Magyar emigration which the present political and economic situation favours.  The chief gainer by the change will be the Magyar peasantry, who have in their own way been exploited by the ruling oligarchy as cruelly as their non-Magyar neighbours.  One result of the war will be to discredit the policy and methods of this oligarchy and to hasten the break-up of the vast latifundia of the great magnates and the Church, and those other drastic land reforms without which Hungary cannot hope to attain her full economic value as the granary of central Europe.  Hitherto the government of the day has secured a parliamentary majority by corrupting and terrorising the non-Magyar constituencies of the periphery and thus out-voting the radical Magyar stalwarts of the great plain; and with the loss of the Slovak, Ruthene and Roumanian districts this system would automatically collapse.  The result might be a genuine strengthening of democratic elements and the dawn of a new era for the Magyar race.