Page:The future of Bohemia by Seton-Watson (1915).pdf/30

mean the break-up of the Dual Monarchy and the achievement of Bohemian independence. Independent Bohemia, if it can once be achieved, will not be by any means a mere negligible quantity. Comprising the greater part of the three Austrian provinces of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia—what is left of the territories of the mediæval Crown of St. Wenceslas—and also the Slovak districts of Northern Hungary, Bohemia would possess a population of not less than eleven or twelve millions, and would thus occupy the eighth place among the twenty-two States of Europe. And here it is necessary to point out that with the fate of Bohemia is inseparably bound up the fate of their close kinsmen the Slovaks, one of the most naturally gifted and attractive of all the Slavonic races, whose political and intellectual development has for generations past been brutally stunted by the deliberate policy of the Magyar oligarchy. Their language has been banished from all secondary schools, colleges and seminaries, and is being steadily expelled even from the primary schools. It is excluded from the administration and from every public office; even on the railways and in the post offices Slovak inscriptions are not tolerated. The Slovak Press has for years been subject to brutal persecution. Right of assembly or association does not exist for the unhappy Slovaks, or indeed for the other non-Magyar races of Hungary. The small intellectual class is the victim of official pressure and persecution in every imaginable