The new treaty with France brings Czecho-Slovakia still more prominently forward. Poor exhausted bankrupt Poland, that sucked orange, is thrust aside, and Czecho-Slovakia becomes the keystone of France’s restless incessant rearrangement of alliances. But Czecho-Slovakia is a very different country from Poland; it is sturdier and less romantically inclined, its President and chief Minister are among the most level-headed and far-seeing of European statesmen; and it is likely to prove a sobering and restraining influence upon French activities. Bohemia is the projecting westward angle of the Slav world; its language is closely akin to Russian, Serbian, Polish and Bulgarian; within its boundaries there are more than three million Germans, and three-quarters of a million of Magyars, and its natural destiny seems to be that it should act as a region of exchange and interpretation between the Slavic world, Hungary and Turkey, and the world of Central and Western Europe. German speech encloses it upon three sides. In itself, with its thirteen million odd of heterogeneous population, largely engaged in agriculture, it cannot be a country of any great importance; its importance now, as in the past, lies in its position and its possible inter-racial functions. To these the President and his chief Minister and pupil, Mr. Benes, are acutely alive. They see in their country a meeting-place and reconciler of European interests. They are ambitious to make it a centre of trade, of intellectual interchange, and political unification. For this end they have worked steadfastly since their country emerged into renewed political existence in 1918. Theirs is a splendid and civilised dream. It has been stated in many quarters that this new alliance has been made hastily, and at the initiative of France, as a stepping-stone to an understanding with Russia. The possibility of a Labour Government in Great Britain, and of a complete British recognition of Russia, is supposed to have driven France into a hasty search for an intermediary who would help her to end her long feud with the Bolsheviks. But in reality the recent visit of President Masaryk to Paris and London was already arranged last summer. He was already discussing the problems of this understanding then. It is probably a Czech rather than a French initiative that has brought it about. There is something very attractive in these steadfast schemes to make Bohemia the centre of a Europe renewed. I think everyone who hopes to see a more noble and spacious civilisation emerging from the distresses of the present time must feel warmly sympathetic with these great ambitions. But it is impossible to ignore the enormous disadvantages against which the imaginations of President Masaryk and Mr. Benes and their colleagues are pitted. They make their creative effort in a tangle of long-accumulated difficulties and with some extraordinarily intractable material.