Czechs Sentence Examples

Bethlen accepted the title but refused to be crowned, and war was resumed, till the defeat of the Czechs at the battle of the White Hill gave a new turn to affairs.

He took a leading part in the negotiation of 1890 for the Bohemian settlement, but the elections of 1891, in which the young Czechs who were opposed to the feudal party gained a decisive victory, made his position a very difficult one.

With the old Czechs he refused to recognise the constitution of 1867; he helped to draft the declaration of 1868 and the fundamental articles of 1871, and took a leading part in the negotiations during the ministry of Potocki and Hohenwart.

On returning home he was crowned with the holy crown on the 29th of March 1464, and, after driving the Czechs out of his northern counties, turned southwards again, this time recovering all the parts of Bosnia which still remained in Turkish hands.

The most noticeable feature of recent Moravian history has been the active sympathy of its inhabitants with the anti-Teutonic home-rule agitation of the Bohemian Czechs.

But by this time the Turkish 3 Though elected king of the Romans in 1411, he cannot be regarded as the legal emperor till his coronation at Rome in 1.423, and if he was titular king of Bohemia as early as 1419, he was not acknowledged as king by the Czechs themselves till 1436.

It was with a small force of mercenaries, raised at his own expense, that the young king won his first Turkish victories, and expelled the Czechs from his northern and the Habsburgs from his western provinces.

Throughout his reign the Czechs and the Germans were every whit as dangerous to Hungary as the Turks, and the political necessity which finally compelled Matthias to partition Austria and Bohemia, in order to secure Hungary, committed him to a policy of extreme circumspection.

The counties were administered by imperial officials, Germans, Czechs and Galicians, who did not understand the Magyar tongue.

At the opening sitting (May 30) Czechs, Poles and Ruthenes defined their national attitude in formal resolutions, and the Slovene leader, Father Korosec, in the name of the Yugoslays, demanded " the union of all the Yugoslav territories of the Monarchy in an independent state organism, free from the rule of any foreign nation, and resting on a democratic basis, under the sceptre of the Habsburg-Lorraine Dynasty."

The Czechs and Yugosla y s, finding the door thus shut in the face of their national aspirations, even in the modified Habsburg form, naturally stiffened in their opposition.

The German element is, of course, the most numerous, but there are also a great number of Hungarians, Czechs and other Slays.

In 1900 the population included 1,386,115 persons of German nationality, 102,974 Czechs and Slovaks, 4346 Poles, 805 Ruthenians, 1329 Slovenes, 271 Serbo-Croatians, and 1368 Italians, all Austrian subjects.

I,151,210 II 1 Czechs, Magyars, Sla y s Bohemia 77,247 01 Hungary 256,347 2.5 Poland 141,908 Rumania 10,377 0.1 Russia 500,797 0 I Total Europe 9,197,014 88.9 3.6 Grand Total 10,339,539 Total Swiss-Switzerland Greeks-Greece Turks-Turkey Europe, not specified 135,736 7,325 3,411 294 North America All other countries 77 6, 071 7.5 366,454 100 0 1'4 4.8 9.5 A very important transformation has taken place in the proportionate number coming from different countries during the last half of the 19th century.

Of later years, the Italians, Czechs, Hungarians and Russians were, as will be seen from the following table, numerously represented.

Silesia, now split up into seventeen principalities, was the bone of contention between them; and when Casimir suddenly invaded that country, took Wschowa, and made Prince Charles of Bohemia a prisoner, war between the two kingdoms actually broke out and Casimir was besieged in Cracow by the Czechs.

In eastern Europe the Avars had owned themselves completely under his power in 805; campaigns against the Czechs in 805 and 806 had met with some success, and about the same time the land of the Sorbs was ravaged; while at the western extremity of the continent the Breton nobles had done homage to Charles at Tours in 800.

His parents appear to have been well-to-do Czechs of the peasant class.

It was in Bohemia that they championed the principle most openly, where they were striving for national separation and protection against the Czechs of the territories which they had inhabited since the Middle Ages.

The Czechs came under the sceptre of the Habsburgs after the battle with the Turks at Mohacs (1526), through an inheritance treaty confirmed by the vote of their Estates; an unsuccessful rebellion which they made in 1621 against the ruling house as protagonist of the counter-Reformation, brought them under the power of a ruthless conqueror, who wished to crush both their faith and their national independence.

The Czechs rightly refer to this period 300 years ago when they describe themselves as a once oppressed nation.

This comprehensive book describes the collective life of the " Bohemian " people, as the Czechs called themselves in contrast to their present.

Just as the Czechs had a majority in Bohemia, so had the Poles in Galicia; and they used their strength against the Ruthenians.

When the Czechs refused this request the Germans responded with more obstinate obstruction.

The Government stepped in and appointed a mixed commission of Germans and Czechs, which should, as it were, administer the affairs of this country like a trustee for a person incapable of volition.

The Germans were thereby deprived of their weapon of obstruction, and the Czechs lost the power of misusing their majority to oppress the Germans.

The Czechs declared this to be a breach of the constitution; but the courts recognized the national commission as a measure of necessity justified in law.

Thus Germans, Czechs and Poles were provided for.

The Germans thereupon paralyzed the Prague Diet by means of obstruction, upon which the Czech members of the Beck Cabinet left it, and the prime minister, seeing himself abandoned by both Germans and Czechs, resigned on Nov.

Moreover the three chief nationalities, the Germans, Poles and Czechs, were each represented by a so-called national minister (Landsmann-Minister).

These German demands, which were exactly analogous to those formerly put forward by the Czechs, so long as they were still in a minority, now roused violent opposition among the latter.

They called attention to the fact that the Germans in earlier days were deaf to such requests; they saw in them a " dismemberment of the country," and asserted that in the central public departments of Vienna, too, the Czechs did not occupy a number of official positions in proportion to their population.

This time the Poles came to the rescue of the Government in its hour of need, by getting a form of standing order approved which rendered obstruction somewhat more difficult, and in this, curiously enough, they were helped by the Czechs; for obstruction had brought even them into an impasse, since their financial requirements had not been met.

Thus the law for strengthening of the standing orders was carried through by an ad hoc combination of Poles, Czechs and Christian Socialists.

At this time the Czechs were trying to gain a foothold in frontier lands which had hitherto been considered solely German.

They alleged as a reason that two small country communes of Lower Austria, Oberand Unter-Themmenau, had a mixed colony of Czechs and Croats; it was further advanced on their side that a considerable annual migration to Vienna took place, which became Germanized in the second generation, and so lost to their Czech nationality.

Vienna, with over ioo,000 Czechs, was actually the second largest Czech town.

In reality a still clearer diminution of the Czech population of Vienna was noticeable; according to the census of 1900, out of 1,674,000 inhabitants there were 102,970 Czechs, i.e.

The Czechs, however, had realized that at need they could get along without a Diet, and they began once more their encroachments in Vienna.

But the Czechs not only demanded two Czech ministers, but also a number of headships of departments and councillorships in each department.

It was only to be expected that the Germans, whose very existence was in question, should show themselves to be patriotic. But it was somewhat surprising that at Prague, after the declaration of war, Germans and Czechs sang Die TV acht am Rhein together in the streets, and the burgomaster, a Czech, made a speech in German before the town hall in which he called for cheers for the Emperor William and the fraternization of Germans and Czechs.

The action of the Czechs was even more dangerous to the state; on Jan.

The Czechs, however, declared that.

This programme met with a cool reception; the Poles by now were expecting a new organization from the Peace Congress; the Southern Sla y s desired union with those of their race in Hungary also; the Czechs opposed the division of the administrative commission into two parts; they did not want autonomy for their nation, but incorporation of the German Bohemians in their State, and refused all negotiations.

But since the non-German nationalities were not prepared to accept such a peaceful settlement, the liquidation between the monarchy and the new republic was confined to German-Austria, and Lammasch's friendly offices might certainly be thanked for the fact that in this quarter the settlement was achieved quite bloodlessly, in favourable contrast with the two years of fighting between Czechs, Poles, Ruthenians, Magyars, Rumanians, Southern Slays and Italians.

Pop. (1900) 24,387, of whom 4200 are Czechs and the remainder Germans.

German priests and bishops carried the Christian faith to the Czechs and the Moravians, laboured among the Hungarians and the Poles, and won the wide district between the Elbe and the Oder at once for Christianity and for the German nation.

The Czechs and the Slovaks, or, to give them their united name, the Czechoslovaks, are a branch of the great Slav family of which the Russians are the most numerous and the most important member and to which the Serbo-Croats with the Slovenes, the Poles, the Bulgarians and the Wends of Germany also belong.

Their presence is largely the result, firstly of a colonization which was favoured by the Bohemian kings and princes of the 12th and 13th centuries, and secondly of a policy of Germanization pursued by the Habsburg rulers from the date of the battle of the White Mountain in 1620 (when the Czechs lost their independence) up till the very close of the World War.

When in July 1914 Austria commenced hostilities against Serbia, thus bringing about the World War, this act of aggression took place against the will of the Czechs and Slovaks, at that time subject to Austrian and Hungarian rule respectively.

Whenever opinions did happen to be expressed which could be construed as criticism of Austria or Germany the offenders were speedily punished, and it was not long before the political leaders of the Czechs and Slovaks found themselves in confinement, some of them under sentence of death, while the Czech and Slovak press was subjected to a rigorous censorship and many of its organs prohibited from appearing.

The persecutions, sometimes revolting in their cruelty, to which (on account of their pro-Ally sympathies) the Czechs were subjected during the first two years of the war, had the effect of uniting all the different political parties into one single national block; and when the Austrian Parliament was at length convoked in May 1917 the Czech parties made a unanimous declaration that it was their aim to work for the union of Czechs and Slovaks as one people in an independent state.

Meanwhile the Czechs, who were as Austrian subjects obliged to serve in the Austrian army, lost no opportunity of passing over to the Allies.

Of 70,000 prisoners taken by Serbia early in the war 35,000 were Czechs.

The activities of Prof. Masaryk in Russia, England and America, enthusiastically supported by his compatriots living abroad, and especially by the Czechs and Slovaks who had emigrated to the United States, the self-sacrificing valour of the Czechoslovak legions on the French, Italian and Russian fronts, and the work of the Czechoslovak Council with its headquarters at Paris, moved the Allies to acknowledge the last-named body as the de facto Provisional Government of the Czechoslovak State.

The Czechs at home declined even discussion with the Vienna Government, and declared that the question of Czechoslovakia must be left to the Peace Conference.

The Hungarians (Magyars) declined to surrender the territories inhabited by Slovaks, and it was necessary to call in the military help of the Czechs before the last Hungarian troops, who had initiated a reign of terror in Slovakia, could be driven out of the land.

The Czechs have possessed a notable literature from the 13th century onwards.

The revival of the Czechs after a hundred years of torpor, due to the loss of their independence in 1620 and subsequent oppression at the hands of the Habsburgs and the dominant Germans, gave birth, from 1780 onwards, to a literary activity which still continues to yield rich fruit.

The Czechs were famous as musicians as far back as the 15th century.

Modern painting among the Czechs begins with Josef Manes (1826-71) and Czermak (1831-78), and Ales.

The Polish king was always ready enough to support the Czechs against Sigismund; but the necessity of justifying his own orthodoxy (which the Knights were for ever impugning) at Rome and in the face of Europe prevented him from accepting the crown of St Wenceslaus from the hands of heretics.

His most successful achievement was the union with Poland for mutual defence against the Habsburgs and the Czechs.

Three-fourths of the inhabitants and territory are German, but to the east of the Oder the Poles, more than 1,000,000 in number, form the bulk of the population, while there are about 15,500 Czechs in the south part of the province and 25,000 Wends near Liegnitz.

The Germans formed 44.69% of the population, 33.21% were Poles and 22.05% Czechs and Sla y s.

The river March is the frontier north of the Danube from Pressburg as far as BrUnn, to the north of which the German regions begin near Olmtz, the interior of Bohemia and Moravia being occupied by Czechs and Moravias.

The Wends are decreasing in number, as are also the Lithuanians on the eastern border of East Prussia, Czechs are only found in Silesia on the confines of Bohemia.

Composed of a congeries of nationalities which included Czechs, Magyars, Ruthenes, Rumanians, Germans, Italians, Flemings and other races, and with territories separated by many miles, the Habsburg dominions required from their ruler patience, tolerance, administrative skill and a full knowledge of the currents of European diplomacy.

The isolated revolts in Italy were easily suppressed; and the insurrection of Poland, though it provoked the lively sympathy of the Magyars and Czechs, led to no actual movement in the Habsburg states.

On the i 1 th of March a meeting of " young Czechs " at Prague drew up a petition embodying nationalist and liberal demands; and on the same day the diet of Lower Austria petitioned the crown to summon a meeting of the delegates of the diets to set the Austrian finances in order.

This was, however, met by vigorous protests from Czechs and Poles, while its provisions for a partly nominated senate, and the indirect election of deputies, excited the wrath of radical Vienna.

In Bohemia, where the attempt to hold elections for the Frankfort parliament had broken down on the opposition of the Czechs and the conservative German aristocracy, a separate constitution had been proclaimed on the 8th of April; on March the 23rd the election by the diet of Agram of Baron Joseph Jellachich as ban of Croatia was confirmed, as a concession to the agitation among the southern Sla y s; on the 18th of March Count Stadion had proclaimed a new con stitution for Galicia.

But the great object lesson was furnished by the events in Prague, where the quarrel between Czechs and Germans, radicals and conservatives, issued on the 12th of June in a rising of the Czech students and populace.

The 16th of June had been fatal to the idea of an independent Bohemia, fatal also to Pan-Slav dreams. To the Czechs the most immediate peril now seemed that from the German parliament, and in the interests of their nationality they were willing to join the Austrian government in the struggle against German liberalism.

On the 4th of March the constitution was published; but it proved all but as distasteful to Czechs and Croats as to the Magyars, and the speedy successes of the Hungarian arms made it, for the while, a dead letter.

The Magyar nation, - as well as the Czechs, had refused to recognize the of validity of the constitution of 1861 which had estab- dua lished a common parliament for the whole empire; monarc they demanded that the independence of the kingdom of Hungary should be restored.

Politically, the principle underlying the agreement was that the empire should be divided into two portions; in one of these the Magyars were to rule, in the other the Germans; in either section the Slav races - the Serbs and Croatians, the Czechs, Poles and Slovenes - were to be placed in a position of political inferiority.

Had he done so, the strong anti-German passions of the Czechs and Poles, always inclined to an alliance with France, would have been aroused, and no government could have maintained the alliance.

During 1899 parliamentary peace was restored in Hungary by the resignation of Banffy; in Austria, however, though there was again a change of ministry the only result was that the Czechs imitated the example of the Germans and resorted to obstruction so that still no business could be done.

Parliamentary life in Austria was paralysed by the feud between Germans and Czechs that resulted directly from the Badeni language ordinances of 1897 and indirectly from the development of Slav influence, particularly that of Czechs and Poles during the Taaffe era (1879-1893).

On the one hand, a reluctance to confess that Hungary is no longer in any sense a part of Austria; on the other hand, the refusal of the Czechs to recognize that their country is part of Austria.

The Czechs of Bohemia, like the Magyars, had refused to recognize the common parliament on the ground that it violated the.

Not only did the party include all the Czechs, but they were supported by many of the great nobles who were of German descent, including Count Leo Thun, his brother-in-law Count Heinrich Clam-Martinitz, and Prince Friedrich von Schwarzenberg, cardinal archbishop of Prague, who hoped in a self-governing kingdom of Bohemia to preserve that power which was threatened by the German Liberals.

On the other hand the Germans of Bohemia, fearful of falling under the control of the Czechs,.

The Czechs were supported also by their fellow-countrymen in Moravia, and some of the nobles, headed by Count Belcredi, brother of the minister; but in Briinn there was a strong German party.

The southern Sla y s had neither the unity, nor the organization, nor the historical traditions of the Czechs and Poles; but the Slovenes, who formed a large majority of the population in Carniola, and a considerable minority in the adjoining territory of Carinthia and the south of Styria, demanded that their language should be used for purposes of government and education.

The result was that Bohemia now sent a large German majority to Vienna, and the few Czechs who were chosen refused to take their seat in the parliament.

Had the example of the Czechs been followed by the other Slav races it would still have been difficult to get together a Reichsrath to pass the Ausgleich.

When the Reichsrath met, the government had a large majority; and in the House, in which all the races except the Czechs were represented, the Ausgleich was ratified The con- almost unanimously.

In Galicia the extreme party, ism in Oa- headed by Smolka, had always desired to imitate the licia and Czechs and not attend at Vienna; they were outvoted, Bohemia, but all parties agreed on a declaration in which the final demands of the Poles were drawn up;' they asked that the powers of the Galician diet should be much increased, and that the members from Galicia should cease to attend the Reichsrath on the discussion of those matters with which the Galician diet should be qualified to deal.

In Bohemia the Czechs were very active; while the Poles were parading their hostility to Russia in such a manner as to cause the emperor to avoid visiting Galicia, some of the Czech leaders attended a Slav demonstration at Moscow, and in 1868 they drew up and presented to the diet at Prague a " declaration " which has since been regarded as the official statement of their claims. They asked for the full restoration of the Bohemian kingdom; they contended that no foreign assembly was qualified to impose taxes in Bohemia; that the diet was not qualified to elect representatives to go to Vienna, and that a separate settlement must be made with Bohemia similar to that with Hungary.

Feudals and Czechs all supported the declaration of 1868, and would accept no compromise, and he returned to Vienna after what was the greatest disappointment of his life.

This time in Bohemia the Czechs, supported by the Feudals and the Clericals, gained a large majority; they took their seats in the diet only to declare that they did not regard it as the legal representative of the Bohemian kingdom, but merely an informal assembly, and refused to elect delegates for the Reichsrath.

The Germans in their turn now left the diet, and the Czechs voted an address to the crown, drawn up by Count Thun, demanding the restoration of the Bohemian kingdom.

By the help of the Clericals they won enough seats to put the Liberals in a minority in the Reichsrath, and it would be possible to revise the constitution if the Czechs consented to come.

It was received with delight throughout Bohemia, and the Czechs drew a draft constitution of fundamental rights.

The Czechs must come to Vienna, and consider a revision of the constitution in a constitutional manner.

These measures were successful; a large German majority was secured; Jews from Vienna sat in the place of the Thuns and the Schwarzenbergs; and as for many years the Czechs refused to sit in the diet, the government could be carried on without difficulty.

At this time the Czechs were much weakened by quarrels among themselves.

A new party had arisen, calling themselves Radicals, but generally known as the Young Czechs.

They violently attacked Rieger, the leader of the Old Czechs, who maintained the alliance with the Feudalists and the policy of passive opposition.

They were completely defeated in the elections which followed, but for the next four years the two parties among the Czechs were as much occupied in opposing one another as in opposing the Germans.

Parliament was dissolved in the summer, and Taaffe, by private negotiations, first of all persuaded the Bohemian feudal proprietors to give the Feudalists, who had long been excluded, a certain number of seats; secondly, he succeeded where Potocki had failed, and came to an agreement with the Czechs; they had already, in 1878, taken their seats in the diet at Prague, and now gave up the policy of " passive resistance," and consented to take their seats also in the parliament at Vienna.

The Liberals had also lost many seats, so that the House now had a completely different aspect; the constitutionalists were reduced to 91 Liberals and 54 Radicals; but the Right, under Hohenwart, had increased to 57, and there were 57 Poles and 54 Czechs.

The German members of the government resigned, their place was taken by Clericals, Poles and Czechs, Smolka was elected president of the Lower House of the Reichsrath, and the German Liberals found themselves in a minority opposed by the " iron ring " of these three parties, and helpless in the parliament of their own creation.

They continued to support him, even if they did not get from him all that they could have wished, and the Czechs acquiesced in a foreign policy with which they had little sympathy.

Meanwhile it was necessary for the government to do something for the Czechs and the other Sla y s, on whose support they depended for their majority.

In Bohemia the Czechs claim that their language shall be recognized as customary, even in those districts such as Reichenberg, which are almost completely German; the Germans, on the other hand, claim that the Czech language shall only be recognized in those towns and districts where there is a considerable Czech population.

In Prague the victory of the Czechs has been marked by the removal of all German street names, and the Czech town council even passed a by-law forbidding private individuals to have tablets put up with the name of the street in German.

Then not only were a large number of Czech elementary schools founded, but also many middle schools were given to the Czechs, and Czech classes introduced in German schools; and, what affected the Germans most, in 1882 classes in Czech were started in the university of Prague - a desecration, as it seemed, of the oldest German university.

Prague was no longer the German city it had been fifty years before; the census of 1880 showed 36,000 Germans to 120,000 Czechs.

It was partly due to economic causes - the greater increase among the Czechs, and the greater migration from the country to the towns; partly the result of the romantic and nationalist movement which had arisen about 1830, and partly the result of establishing popular education and parliamentary government at the same time.

The Czechs, of course, refused even to consider it; it would have cut away the ground on which their whole policy was built up, namely, the indissoluble unity of the Bohemian kingdom, in which German and Czech should throughout be recognized as equal and parallel languages.

It was rejected on a motion of Prince Karl Schwarzenberg without discussion, and on this all the Germans rose and left the diet, thereby imitating the action of the Czechs in old days when they had the majority.

Notwithstanding the concessions about language the Czechs had, however, made no advance towards their real object - the recognition of the Bohemian kingdom.

Perhaps the leaders of the party, who were now growing old, would have been content with the influence they had already attained, but they were hard pressed at home by the Young Czechs, who were more impatient.

The influence by which his policy was directed is not quite clear, but the Czechs had been of recent years less easy to deal with, and Taaffe had never really shown any wish to alter the constitution; his policy always was to destroy the influence of parliament by playing off one party against the other, and so to win a clear field for the government.

During the month of January conferences were held at Vienna, with Taaffe in the chair, to which were invited representatives of the three groups into which the Bohemian representatives were divided, the German party, the Czechs, and the Feudal party.

But they were not carried; the chief reason being that the Young Czechs had not been asked to take part in the conference, and did not consider themselves bound by its decisions; they opposed the measures and had recourse to obstruction, and a certain number of the Old Czechs gradually came over to them.

At the elections in 1891 a great struggle took place between the Old and the Young Czechs.

But the disappearance of the Old Czechs made the parliamentary situation very insecure.

The Young Czechs could not take their place; their Radical and anti-clerical tendencies alarmed the Feudalists and Clericalists who formed so large a part of the Right; they attacked the alliance with Germany; they made public demonstration of their French sympathies; they entered into communication with other Slav races, especially the Serbs of Hungary and Bosnia; they demanded universal suffrage, and occasionally supported the German Radicals in their opposition to the Clerical parties, especially in educational matters; under their influence disorder increased in Bohemia, a secret society called the Umladina (an imitation of the Servian society of that name) was discovered, and stringent measures had to be taken to preserve order.

For two years the government seemed to waver, looking now to the Left, now to Hohenwart and his friends; for a time Taaffe really had the support of all parties except the Young Czechs.

Universal suffrage had long been demanded by the working men and the Socialists; the Young Czechs also had put it on their programme, and many of the Christian Socialists and anti-Semites desired an alteration of the franchise..

The strongest of them were the fifty-nine Poles and sixty Young Czechs; he therefore attempted, as Taaffe had done, to come to some agreement with them.

The Poles were always ready to support the govenment; among the Young Czechs the more moderate had already attempted to restrain the wilder spirits of the party, and they were quite prepared to enter into negotiations.

The Nationalists refused to allow Lueger to speak, clapping their desks, hissing and making other noises, till at last the Young Czechs attempted to prevent the disorder by violence.

The Nationalists therefore stormed the platform, and the president and ministers had to fly into their private rooms to escape personal violence, until the Czechs came to their rescue, and by superiority in numbers and physical strength severely punished Herr Wolf and his friends.

The Czechs also were offended; they arranged riots at Prague; the professors in the university refused to lecture unless the German students were defended from violence; Gautsch resigned, and Thun, who had been governor of Bohemia, was appointed minister.

The Czechs, of course, went into opposition, and used obstruction.

The Czechs, however, prevented him passing a law on excise which was a necessary part of the agreements with Hungary; it was, therefore, impossible for him to carry on the government without breaking his word; there was nothing left for him to do but to resign, after holding office for less than three months.

During the early months of 1900 matters were more peaceful, and Korber hoped to be able to arrange a compromise; but the Czechs now demanded the restoration of their language in the internal service of Bohemia, and on 8th June, by noise and disturbance, obliged the president to suspend the sitting.

The Czechs refrained from obstruction, for they did not wish to forfeit the alliance with the Poles and Conservatives, on which their parliamentary strength depended, and the Germans used the opportunity to pass measures for promoting the material prosperity of the country, especially for an important system of canals which would bring additional prosperity to the coal-fields and manufactures of Bohemia.

Germans and Czechs, induced the Chamber to sanction the estimates, the contingent of recruits and other " necessities of state " for 1901 and 1902, by promising to undertake large public works in which Czechs and Germans were alike interested.

The Young Czechs, too, were favourable, while the Poles reserved their attitude.

The premier, Dr von Korber, who had undertaken to overcome obstruc and January 1903 to promote a compromise between Czechs and Germans proved equally futile.

The Czechs demanded on the contrary that both their language and German should be placed on an equal footing throughout Bohemia, and be used for all official purposes in the same way.

The Czechs blocked business by a pile of " urgency motions " and occasionally indulged in noisy obstruction.

Thus Germans were obliged to vote for Germans and Czechs for Czechs; and, though there might be victories of Clerical over Liberal Germans or of Czech Radicals over Young Czechs, there could be no victories of Czechs over Germans, Poles over Ruthenes, or Slovenes over Italians.

With the Czechs, who on his accession to office had shown some suspicion on account of his intimate connexion with the leading members of the loyal Bohemian landed aristocracy, he succeeded in maintaining reasonably good relations.

According to nationality, about 35% are Germans and 65% Czechs.

The Czechs occupy the middle of the country, as well as its south and south-east region, while the Germans are concentrated near its borders, especially in the north and west, and are also found all over the country in the large towns.

Besides, there are numerous German-speaking enclaves situated in purely Czech districts; on the other hand, the Czechs have shown a tendency to invade the purely German mining and manufacturing districts.

These were in turn expelled from Croatia by the Croats, a Slavonic people from the western Carpathians, who, according to some authorities, had occupied the territories of the Marcomanni in Bohemia, and been driven thence in the 6th century by the Czechs.

Every one was sick of government by deputy; they desired a strong hand Cardinal and an energetic foreign policy, after the defeat of Rkheileu the Czechs at the White Mountain by the house of 1624- Austria, the Spanish intrigues in the Valtellina, and 1642 the resumption of war between Spain and Holland.

He then proceeded to clear Pomerania of the piebald imperial host composed of every nationality under heaven, and officered by Italians, Irishmen, Czechs, Croats, Danes, Spaniards and Walloons.

Czechs were dubbed " the biggest ethnic cleansers in history.

Some experts believe the day will come when Czechs will barely comprehend their Slavic neighbors.

What happens to the Russians, what happens to the Czechs, is a matter of utter indifference to me.

We seem to be watching as, with the utmost complacency, the Czechs abandon the fruits of 150 years of national self-assertion.

The Czechs spanking the USA has made things tough for them as the Americans will be tight at the back against the Italians.

On the resignation of Badeni in 1898 he was made minister president, an office which he held for little more than a year, for, though he succeeded in bringing to a conclusion the negotiations with Hungary, the support he gave to the Czechs and Slovenians increased the opposition of the Germans to such a degree that parliamentary government became impossible, and at the end of 1899 he was dismissed.

They insisted that the Government should introduce proposals as to the official language of functionaries, for they feared a return of the procedure used by Badeni, which by means of a Government ordinance had altered the received usage and upset the national balance of power; that in Bohemia the purely German sub-districts (Bezirke) should be included in German districts (Kreise), and in like manner the purely Czech sub-districts in Czech districts, so that there would then be a relatively small number of territories of mixed nationality, which would have to be governed bilingually; that minorities should be protected by law; and that in appointing to posts in the offices of the autonomous Bohemian territorial Government, proportionate consideration should be given to the Germans, attention being paid to the fact that in Bohemia more than a third of the population were German, and that they paid more than half the taxes, but that the Czech national majority had appointed more than 90% of Czechs and not even 10% of Germans in the Government offices.

This precipitate action aroused the mistrust of the Germans, and, in view of the ambiguous attitude of the prime minister towards the Czechs, led to a vote of censure being passed at a meeting of the German national council at Prague on July is.

A considerable time, however, elapsed before the Slovaks were allowed without hindrance to unite fully with the Czechs.

The Czechs were animated with intense sympathy for the real Russian people, and looked forward to the day when they will be able to cooperate as kinsmen in the reconstruction of a peaceful and well-ordered Russia.

In the elections which followed in Bohemia the influence of the government was sufficient to secure a German majority among the landed proprietors; the Czechs, who were therefore in a minority, declared the elections invalid, refused to take any part in electing deputies for the Reichsrath, and seceded altogether from the diet.

Potocki, now minister-president, then entered on negotiations, hoping to persuade the Czechs to accept the constitution.

Forty-two Czechs who had won seats did not attend; forty-three Poles stood aloof from all party combination, giving their votes on each occasion as the interest of their country seemed to require; the real opposition was limited to forty Clericals and representatives of the other Slav races, who were collected on the Right under the leadership of Hohenwart.

A result of this is that, as educated Czechs are generally bilingual, it is easier for them to obtain appointments in districts where a knowledge of Czech is required, and the Germans, therefore, regard every order requiring the use of Czech as an order which excludes Germans from a certain number of posts.

Many pundits are also tipping the Czechs to go all the way to the final.

The U.S. is overrated, I feel, and the Czechs will be very tough to beat.