Page:The heart of Europe; an address delivered by Charles Pergler in Washington, December 11, 1916, at a conference of oppressed or dependent nationalities (IA heartofeuropeadd00pergrich).pdf/11

tration by them. During this war, however, the true earmarks of the national character of the Prussianized Germans have become amply known to the world. The world can well form its own judgment about a race that can celebrate and have its school children participate in the celebration of the sinking of the Lusitania! What rights and justice can a conquered nation expect from such a race? The forcible expatriation of the Poles by Prussia in the years preceding the great war as well as the Prussian behavior in Belgium and northern France since the beginningof the war makes Prussia a proper ally of Austria and of Turkey, whose Serbian and Armenian crimes are only a continuation of their histories so replete with murder, oppression, and injustice. Austria’s treatment of Bohemia after the Bohemian period of the thirty years’ war was one of constant forcible expatriation, murder, and attempts at a complete annihilation of the Bohemian people. Her continued fearful oppression and enslavement of the Bohemian people for two centuries and her untiring zeal to destroy all the cultural products of centuries of the Bohemian people, especially their literature, and to erase the glorious history of Bohemia from the pages of history of the nations of the world was the application of “might is right” of victorious German Austria over Bohemia. Were it not for the fact that the blessings flowing from the French Revolution spread over Bohemia, as well as over Europe generally, it is not unlikely that Austria would have continued her fearful rule in Bohemia during the past century as she carried it on during the two preceding