s would not be complete unless their close
kinsmen the Slovaks were included in the new Bohemian State; and every
reason alike of politics, race, and geography tells overwhelmingly in
favour of such an arrangement. The Slovaks, who would to the last man
welcome the change, have long suffered from the gross tyranny of Magyar
rule. Their schools and institutions have been ruthlessly suppressed or
reduced in numbers, their press muzzled, their political development
arrested, their culture and traditions--far more truly autochthonous than
those of the conquering Magyar invaders--have been discouraged and hampered
at every turn. The Slovaks are a race whose artistic and musical gifts,
whose innate sense of colour and poetry have won the sympathy and
admiration of all who know them; and their systematic oppression at the
hands of the Magyar oligarchy is one of the greatest infamies of the last
fifty years. In this war Britain has proclaimed herself the champion of
the small nations, and none are more deserving of her sympathy than the
Slovaks. Unless our statesmen renounce that principle of nationality which
they have so loudly proclaimed, the Slovaks cannot be abandoned to their
fate; for they form an essential part of the Bohemian problem. Without
them the new kingdom could not stand alone, isolated as it would be among
hostile or indifferent neighbours. In every way the Slovak districts form
the natural continuation of Bohemia and are the necessary link between it
and Russia, upon whose moral support the new State must rely in the first
critical years of its existence.

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 industria