Page:Bohemia under Hapsburg misrule (1915).pdf/124

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120
BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS

it is obvious that the future teachers of Slovak children will have no means, except by private study, to learn the language of their little charges.

Neither Vienna nor Budapest will listen to their appeal for justice. The Lord is too high and the Emperor-King too far away to hear and see the Slovaks. The Rumuns in Transylvania may hope for succor from their motherland, Rumania; Italians in the unredeemed provinces may look forward to the time when Italy will liberate them from Austrian misrule; even the Serbs in Southern Hungary find new courage in resisting oppression by reason of their nearness to their brothers in the Serbian Kingdom. Whence shall Slovaks look for sympathy and help? Their nearest kinsmen, the Bohemians, who, of all the nations, best understand them, are themselves held down by an alien oppressor and unable to give them other than moral aid.

“In comparison with the Government of Magyarland the Government of Austria is a model of tolerance.”[1]

This is the opinion of an Englishman who knows conditions in Hungary well. Exterminate the race, suppress its language, obliterate every evidence of its existence: that is now and has been

  1. London Times, January 20, 1915.