politics, who now advise the Czechs to seek their happiness in a free and just Hapsburg monarchy, are surely indulging in the pursuit of an ideal for which the lessons of history provide no support. Why, the idea of that happy new Austria had been for generations the dream of the Czech leaders. Palacky proclaimed it in 1848. Dr. Kramarzh, now a martyr for the Czech cause, was still upholding it half a century later. The Czech nation, which was every day gaining in strength and importance, did not aim at the breaking up of the Hapsburg Monarchy. If ever a nation has given a fair chance to a Government, the Czechs have given it to the Government of Vienna. But what were the results? The weaker branch of the Czecho-Slovak nation was in 1867 handed over to the mercies of the Magyars, however much the entire nation protested against it. In Austria itself the predominance of the Germans was established. The promise given by the Emperor Francis Joseph I, to the Czechs in 1870 that he would crown himself King of Bohemia—as he was crowned King of Hungary in 1867—and thereby recognise the historic rights of the Czech nation, was never fulfilled, and the modest rights conceded to the Czechs in a centralised Austria were never safe against new encroachments. It is a fact which no one acquainted with Austrian history would dare to deny, that the Germans in their narrow nationalist interest have wrecked constitutional life in Austria. They have deliberately crippled the Austrian Parliament, because in that Parliament they were in a minority. Without Parliament they can more conveniently control the State through the German clique at the
