local fame; and so too the famous beer of Pilsen, and that other less innocuous product of the same town, the armaments of the great Skoda works. It is the rapid growth of Bohemian mining industries and manufactures which has so seriously complicated the racial struggle between Czech and German. So long as the population remained more or less rooted to the soil, there was at least the possibility of mapping out the mixed districts and settling upon their special treatment. But with a population kept in a state of continual ebb and flow by industrial developments, minorities are continually cropping up in unexpected places and then again disappearing; and it is unfortunately the case that both Czech and German employers put very considerable pressure on their workmen in a national sense. In short, economics and nationality are inextricably interwoven in Bohemia, just as in Hungary, Roumania, and the Balkans.
The present political and constitutional regime in Austria-Hungary dates from the famous Ausgleich or Compromise of 1867, by which the fate of ten races was surrendered into the hands of two, the Germans and the Magyars, one in each half of the “Dual Monarchy.” Against this system the Czechs of all parties have always vigorously protested, insisting on the claims of the historic crown and kingdom of St. Wenceslas as entitled to at least as much consideration as the Hungarian Crown of St. Stephen. There was indeed a moment, during
