Page:Bohemia under Hapsburg misrule (1915).pdf/74

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BOHEMIANS AND SLOVAKS

parties” tore apart peoples of the same race, setting up a political barrier where nature intended that none should exist. Austria, for instance, had been awarded Dalmatia, the population of which is almost wholly Croatian; yet Slavonia and Croatia, which is also Croatian to the core (or Serbo-{{SIC|Croation|Croatian), went to Hungary. Bohemians of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia were lodged under the Austrian roof; the Slovaks, on the other side, who are almost one with the Bohemian race, were put under the guardianship of Hungary. Nations and races were moved on the Austrian chess-board like so many pawns—exactly the same way as at the Vienna Congress in 1814 and at the Berlin Conference in 1878.

“No people in the monarchy were more unjustly prejudiced by dualism than the Bohemians,” is the opinion of Denis. Every article of the Settlement affected their interests most adversely. Their kinsmen, the Croatians and Serbs, and particularly the Slovaks—the latter always confidently looked upon as a reserve force of the nation—were handed out to inerciless and un feeling masters. The crown of St. Václav (St.Václav is honored as patron saint of Bohemia) was reduced by Vienna to a position of semi-vassalage and given equal rank with a medley of outlying and insignificant provinces. Dualism condemned the Slavs to be the unwilling