different States. The same reasoning applies to the French—in France, Belgium and Switzerland—and to the English. Naturally, the Germans outside Germany are entitled to political freedom and to a due share in the administration of the States to which they belong. Those States, for their part, are entitled to demand that their German citizens shall not be an aggressive vanguard, as the pan-Germans would have them be, and that they should make up their minds to work together in peace with the peoples among whom they have lived for centuries and to whom they are bound by ties material and spiritual.
Our Germans, as I pointed out in my first Presidential Message, originally came to us as colonists; and the significance of this German colonization would not be lessened even if it were true that a few Germans were already living in the country. Yet this does not mean that, as colonists, our Germans are second-class citizens. They were invited to come by our Kings who guaranteed to them the right to live their own lives in full measure—a weighty circumstance, politically and tactically, for the Germans as well as for us. I, for my part, acknowledge and deliberately adopt the policy of our Přemyslide Kings who protected the Germans as a race, though I do not approve of the Germanophil leanings of some of the Přemyslides. I have nothing against the association of the name “Přemyslide”—which, from our verb přemysliti, means “thoughtful”—with the Greek Prometheus, but rather perceive in the name of our first dynasty a reminder that our whole policy, not alone in regard to the Germans, must be well-pondered, thoroughly thought out or, as Havlíček demanded, reasonable and upright. The settlement of the conflict between us and our Germans will be a great political deed, for it implies the solution of a question centuries old, the ordering of our relationship to a large section of the German people and, through it, to the German people as a whole. To this end our Germans must de-Austrianize themselves and get rid of the old habit of mastery and privilege.
Politically, the Germans are the most important of our minorities, and their acceptance of our Republic will simplify all the other minority questions. Alongside of the Germans we have a few Poles, more Little Russians (in Slovakia) and still more Magyars. To them also the rule applies that the rights of race must be safeguarded. Local self-government and proportional representation may, in a democratic State, serve this purpose well. Each minority, too, must have elementary
