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Independent Bohemia early achieved considerable progress in schools and in education; the Bohemian State was organised firmly at an early date and its administration in the hands of trained officials was excellent. Therefore, Bohemia managed to hold its own against Germany. Agriculture and industry were highly developed. Culturally the Czechs have won renown through their Reformation, they being the first nation to resist the mediæval theocracy supported by the German-Roman Empire. From the Prague University, the first university in Central Europe, there came forth John Hus, who by his martyr’s death inspired the whole nation to resist the mediæval theocracy of Rome. With Hus the entire Czech nation opened thus a new era.
In the Hussite period the Czechs distinguished themselves not as warriors only (“every Czech a captain”); alongside of John Zizka, the founder of modern military strategy, we have Hus, Chelcicky and Comenius, the teacher and educator of nations. The Czech national church, the Unity of the Brethren, according to the common judgment of history, was an attempt to put into practice the ideals of the purest Christianity. The Czech Taborites (the radical Hussites) made an attempt to practise Christian communism.
Rome and the Habsburgs, this time backed by all Europe, crushed the Bohemian Reformation; Bohemia, weakened by many wars forced upon her, united with Austria and Hungary, but this union, aimed at the Turkish menace, was employed by the Habsburgs for the suppression of the Czech Reformation. The anti-Catholic revolution of 1618 ended at the White Mountain in Jesuit darkness; but traditions of former power and independence and the progressive ideas of the eighteenth century and especially of the French Revolution, inspired the Czech nation to a new spiritual and national life; the end of the eighteenth century marks the beginning of the renaissance of the Czechs and Slovaks as an organic part of the renaissance of all the nations of Europe. In spite of the constant struggle against the perjured dynasty, the Czech nation is to-day, culturally and economically, one of the most progressive nations. It has thus proved its virility, its energy and ability to hold its own against the pressure of imperialistic Germany and Austria; this high degree of culture, as we have emphasised before, being attained by the Czechs through their own strength, without assistance from the dynasty and from Austria.
In so far, therefore, as culture is an argument for political independence (the administration of the State, especially the democratic administration, being facilitated by the enlightenment of the people), the Czechs and Slovaks can employ this argument with full justification, for they are not less cultured than their oppressors, the Germans and Magyars.[1]
48.—(a) The Czecho-Slovak State will have an area four times as large as that of Belgium, and its population would number about 13 millions, of which the German, Magyar and Polish minorities would number over two millions.
Though we advocate the principle of nationality, we wish to retain our minorities. That seems a paradox, but it is on the very principle of nationality that we wish to retain them. Bohemia is a unique example of a nationally mixed country. Between the Italians and Germans, for instance, the ethnographical frontier is simple and sharply defined. Not so in Bohemia; in a great many places (mines, etc.), and in all the cities, there are considerable Czech or German minorities. The Germans object that the Czech minorities in North Bohemia, etc., are “only” working men—people who live on German bread; but this anti-social argument is obviously false, and it is inconsistent with the process of the industrialisation of Bohemia, which, of course, needs factory “hands”; moreover, it was the Germans themselves who invited the Czechs to come, preferring the Czech working man to the German.
- ↑ Even according to official statistics, there are fewer illiterates among the Czechs than among the Germans.
