the learning of these languages should be made compulsory or not. It must be remembered, if the complexity of our language question is to be understood, that in addition to our home languages we need Latin and Greek in our Classical high schools besides a knowledge of French and English, Russian and Italian. If they are true sons of Comenius, our pedagogues will have to simplify and to perfect our methods of teaching, so that the learning of languages may be made as easy as possible.
Chauvinism is nowhere justified, least of all in our country. A noteworthy fact, which I often mention to Germans and foreigners as characteristic of our people and of our revolution, is that despite all the Austrian acts of oppression during the war and the intolerant demeanour of a large number of our Germans, no violence was done to the Germans in Prague or elsewhere on October 28, 1918. So filled were our folk with the positive idea of creating a State that they thought no evil and took no reprisals. One or two excesses on the part of individuals prove nothing to the contrary. From the first, the leaders of the revolution wished the Germans to cooperate with them; and, at the Geneva Conference between the delegates of the Prague National Committee and Dr. Beneš a proposal was adopted without discussion, as something self-evident, that a German Minister should be included in the Government. In a democracy it is obviously the right of every party to share in the administration of the State as soon as it recognizes the policy of the State and the State itself. Nay, it is its duty to share in it. I know further that the National Committee in Prague simultaneously negotiated with the Germans and sought to gain their goodwill. The Germans affirm that the Lord Lieutenant of Bohemia, Count Coudenhove, was asked on October 29 to join the National Committee as a German representative. In the same spirit our National Committee at Brno, or Brünn, promised the military command in Moravia to invite two Germans to join it. After the revolution, the Czech leaders offered to set up a special Department of State for German affairs—a conciliatory and far-sighted step.
Chauvinism, that is to say, political, religious, racial or class intolerance, has, as history proves, wrought the downfall of all States. A modern Portuguese historian whose name I forget but whom I read in London, shows convincingly that chauvinistic imperialism wrecked the Portuguese World-Empire. The same lesson is taught by the fall of Austria and
