We have our national painters, sculptors, musicians, and our Slovak peasant art and industries. Their work compares favourably with that of more developed nations.
And we have succeeded in accomplishing all this by our own endeavours, for the Austrian Government has ever taken every means to strangle our development. After paying Vienna vast sums in rates and taxes, we were able by making great sacrifices to save such little sums as were required to keep up our education, to assist our artists and architects, and to aid our writers and societies with private subscriptions.
Moreover, we have remained faithful to our traditions of a lofty idealism. We have no such philosophers as Nietzsche; no historians like Mommsen and Treitschke, nor politicians like Bismarck; but the humanitarian and idealist thought of Hus, Chelčický, the Moravian Brothers, Dobrovský, Kollár, Palacký, is to be tound in the work of the writers already mentioned, Mácha, Vrchlický, Čech, Machar, and Březina, and in the minds of men like the publicist Havlíček, the statesman Rieger, and the politician and philosopher Masaryk. We might have followed the German method of violence, and, by calling to our rescue the millions of Eastern Slavs, have thrown off our yoke. But we have always refused to follow this policy. It is in this humanitarian and
