It was a disaster in disguise. For purposes of defence against the growing Turkish menace the Bohemians entered an alliance with Austria and Hungary, reserving, however, for themselves full national rights. In a short time they came to know that the remedy was worse than the disease. The Hapsburgs, as is their habit, soon broke their faith and tried to enforce centralisation in the State and counter-reformation in religion. The Czechs rose up in revolt in 1618 and lit the fire of the Thirty Years’ War. The war which ushered in modern Europe seemed to sound the death-knell of the Czech nation, which in 1620 suffered the disastrous defeat on the White Mountain. With the utmost savagery the Austrian-Germans under Hapsburg and Jesuit leadership uprooted the Czech aristocracy and landed gentry, and filled their places with foreign adventurers, who ever since have insulted the country in which they live by considering themselves its peers and owners. The Czech nation lost all its educated classes and practically ceased to exist. There remained nothing except the soil and the peasants, as indestructible as the soil and as passive.
In the eighteenth century almost the memory of the Czech nation had been lost. They were treated as a kind of moribund aborigines. But this was the darkest hour before the dawn. The nation was awakening. At first the rebirth of the Bohemian nation was limited to a narrow circle of philologists and writers. It was treated by the Germans and the Austrian Government with patronising condescension. But soon it began to expand, spreading further and further until millions of men reawakened
