Page:Bohemia under Hapsburg misrule (1915).pdf/111

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A PLACE IN THE SUN
107

ond university to be located at Brno (Brünn), the capital of Moravia. The University of Prague is scandalously overcrowded and students from the sister state of Moravia are compelled, in consequence, to go to Vienna in search of education, where, under Teutonic influences, many are estranged from their nation. Numerous petitions have been addressed to the government on the subject of a second university, but to no purpose. In the matter of secondary schools (gymnasia and real schools) the discrimination against non-Germans is very striking. For 4,241,918 Bohemians in Bohemia the government maintains 39 schools of this type for secondary education, and they are unable to get more, while 2,467,724 Germans boast 34 of these schools. In Moravia the disproportion is still greater and in Silesia it is relatively worse than in Moravia. The condition of the Bohemian elementary schools in the mixed districts near the border is most deplorable. It was the blind and unreasoning hostility of the authorities in the German-Bohemian districts against Bohemian schools which led the patriots, in 1880, to found a school society called the Ústřední Matice Školská. This vernacular school society had spent, up to 1912, a total of more than $3,000,000 in the establishment and support of such schools in districts inhabited by both races.