nationality and culture. It is not enough to love our Fatherland and people; we need to love them consciously, or, as Neruda once put it, to think out a sound programme of culture all round. My pleading for such a programme before the war led to conflict and controversy about the real value of our nationality. Now that we are free, I do not doubt that it will be more systematically taken in hand. Our historians, our critics of art and of literature, our sociologists and politicians are obliged to find their bearings and to answer the question what we are giving to the treasury of mankind, and what we need to take from other nations so as to be able to give greatly.
The Slav Problem.
It is from this standpoint that I judge the demand for “a Slav policy.” My own policy has always been Slav, even during the war, though I conceived its essence and its aims otherwise than they were, and still are, currently defined among us. Freedom has brought us new Slav tasks—problems that are at once political and administrative as well as questions of culture—such as the union of Slovakia with the historic Bohemian Lands and the right treatment of Sub-Carpathian Russia and of the Polish and Little Russian minorities in Slovakia.
Like all the Slav peoples (with the exception of the smallest of them, the Serbs of Lusatia) we possess to-day a State of our own. Hence our political relationship to them is clearer and more practical than it was under Austria-Hungary. Of the official, economic and political relations, the Government will, of course, be in charge; but reciprocity of culture depends upon educated circles and educational institutions, not upon the Government alone. Such relations are now unhindered, and freedom may render them more efficacious than they were before. The independence of the Slav peoples makes it possible more fully to realize Kollár’s ideal. We shall continue the cooperation with the Southern Slavs and the Poles which, as I have related, arose during the war; and though our relations with Bulgaria were somewhat troubled by the war, the cloud has passed away. Of Russia I have spoken at great length, explaining that, while our sympathies flowed strongly towards Russia from the beginning of our national rebirth, we had few real ties with her. By the end of the eighteenth century she was playing an important part in Europe, and her greatness naturally often led our people to conceive pan-Slavism as pan-
