greatly changed. It suffers a new moral and religious crisis, and becomes once again Catholic.
In 1848, launched into political life, they find themselves in a tragic position. They must resign themselves to defend the existence of a State which had ever oppressed them, to fight for an absolutist dynasty which had deprived them of moral and material wealth, to defend their enemies, and, as it were, assist at their own funeral.
The last thirty years have been spent in active and successful preparation for an intellectual, moral, and material emancipation.
The position of the Czech people is specially tragic during the present war, when they had to join the army of their enemies, who made them their cannon-fodder. They were destined to be sacrificed for the benefit of their oppressors, the cynical adorers of Prussian and Magyar violence; their best forces were to be employed for the realisation of the Pan-German Central Europe, the achievement of which failed in 1848, and which, almost realised to-day, constitutes for the Czecho-Slovaks a danger of intolerable sufferings.
It is in order to escape the sufferings of the past which again threaten them, to assure their peaceful progress in the future, to enable them to range themselves as an advanced and highly civilised nation on the side of the Allies, that the Czecho-Slovaks to-day make their appeal and ask for
