Page:Namier The case of Bohemia (1917).pdf/11

sured by events, was flowing over a dead nation. In appearance the Germans had achieved their aim. The very name of the Czech nation seemed forgotten. When in the second half of the eighteenth century some Slav-speaking inhabitants of Bohemia petitioned the Austrian Emperor, they were described by the picturesque term of Originalböhmen. The Germans looked upon them as a kind of half-extinct aborigines. Then came the great Czech literary renaissance of the romantic age—the spiritual rebirth of Bohemia. By 1848 it had matured into political action, and its first expression was again a protest and a revolt against Germany’s Mid-European Imperialism. The German revolutionary Parliament at Frankfort, the heir of the Holy Roman Empire, summoned representatives from the Bohemian lands. The Czechs refused the invitation, and in order to create a counterbalance to the German power convoked in Prague the first Pan-Slav Congress. The Czechs, Poles and Jugo-Slavs were to unite into a barrier on Germany’s Eastern borders. In Austria, by their joint strength they were to break the force of the Pan-Germans and the Magyars, who then were also the chief enemies of the Hapsburgs. It was a fine dream, shattered almost as soon as it was conceived. It presupposed wisdom and courage in people who had neither—for it was not the Hapsburgs only who were deficient in that respect. The Jugo-Slavs alone shared the