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that for every execution the Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns will be made personally responsible.
After Vienna, Berlin also made an official statement. The Minister of Colonies, Solf (according to a report dated August 22nd), spoke in a contemptible manner of the Czecho-Slovak Army as a band of robbers without a country; yet after the defeat of the Germans at Bakmach the German general asked this band for an armistice, and in 1866 the Prussian army, when it invaded Bohemia in the war against Austria, officially recognised the rights of the Czech nation to independence and promised to help obtain it. The Czechs at that time considered the Prussians to be more dangerous than Austria; from which time the Czechs and Slovaks became convinced that the Habsburgs were mere servants of Prussia, and therefore renounced allegiance to them. By the same right by which the Habsburgs were elected kings of Bohemia they ceased to be kings—the nation elected them, the nation now dismissed them. Count Czernin in the above-mentioned memorandum properly admitted that the Czech nation was of all the Austrian nations least devoted to the dynasty.
46. This makes it plain that the Czechs will not be satisfied with the concession of national autonomy within an Austrian federation; the Czechs have a historical right to the independence of the Czech lands (Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia); they insist on the right to the independence of the State created by them. In addition to that, they have an historical and natural right to the addition of the Slovakia, so brutally oppressed by the Magyars. (The Magyars have a proverb: “Tot nem ember”—the Slovak is not a man.) Slovakia, formerly the centre of the Great Moravian Empire, was torn away by the Magyars in the tenth century, and was later for a short time connected again politically with its kinsman and was for a time independent. Culturally the Slovaks remained constantly in close relation with the Czechs. The Magyars depend culturally on the Slovaks. The union of the Czechs and Slovaks is therefore a legitimate demand. The demand was made not only by the Czechs, but also by the Slovaks. The Slovaks will employ their own dialect in the schools and in the public administration; there can be no language question, because every Slovak, even without an education, understands Czech and every Czech understands Slovak. The Slovaks gave the Czechs in the period of their national renaissance a number of great authors (Kollar, Šafařik), and educated others (Palacký, and, in a measure, also Dobrovsky). The Magyars, though weaker culturally than the Slovaks, attempt to magyarize the latter systematically and brutally; this magyarization was not the natural result of a cultural preponderance, but was artificially maintained merely by the administration, which resorted to violence and corruption, exploiting economic advantages. It is known that the Slovak, and so also the Rumanian, elections to the Parliament end in pitched battles, in which non-Magyar electors are simply shot down—that is the reason why the Hungarian Parliament is Magyar, though the majority of the population is non-Magyar.[1]
47. The Pangermans make the most of the cultural level of the German nation as an argument for its right to world domination; if culture is a necessary condition of political independence, then the Czechs and Slovaks deserve independence fully.
- ↑ The Slovak language is an archaic dialect of the Czech; the difference is only in the archaic forms and in a few additional words. The Slovak language has the same accent as the Czech and the accent is the distinguishing mark of Slav tongues. Polish, Russian and Jugoslav languages have each a different accent. Slovak was introduced as a literary language at the end of the eighteenth century, at the time of the national renaissance of the Czechs and Slovaks; the popular spoken language appealed to the people more than the written Chekh, which remained the language of the Slovak Lutheran Church. Among the Czech and Slovak literary men there arose a sharp dispute about the use of the Slovak, some Slovaks themselves, for instance, Kollar and Safarik, being opposed to it; to-day, these disputes have practically ceased, there being no language question for the younger generation on either side. The unity of the nation and State is in no way menaced by the use of Slovak.
