At the close of the Franco-Prussian War, Frenchmen erected in the Place de la Concorde in Paris the Statue of Strassburg, which they have kept draped, as a sign of mourning for the loss of their beloved Alsace-Lorraine. The Bohemians have grieved for their motherland much longer than the French for the “Lost Provinces.” Bohemia put on her mourning garb in 1620, the year her rebel army was defeated by the imperialist troops of Ferdinand II., at the Battle of White Mountain near Prague, the capital of the kingdom. May it not be hoped that the joyous moment is near when her sons can substitute for the black and yellow of Austria the red and white of Bohemia--the colors that Charles Havlíček loved so well. “My colors are red and white,” declared this fearless patriot to his Austrian tormentors. “You can promise me, you can threaten me, but a traitor I shall never be.” Never during the three hundred years of Austrian misrule were conditions so propitious for throwing off the shackles of oppression as now. In the darkest hours of national humiliation, the children of Hus and of Komenský (Comenius) did not despair. “We existed before Austria,” Palacký used to tell them, “and we shall survive her.” May not the words of the “Father of his Country,” as Palacký was affectionately called by his countrymen, come true, in view of what is taking place in the Hapsburg Monarchy to-day? With what form of government would Bohemia make her re-entry into the European family of nations--as a free state, as a dependency of Russia, as a ward of the Allies, or incorporated in a federation of the states remaining to the Hapsburg Empire? It was a favorite theory of Palacký that the Austrian nations would, for their own protection, have to create an Austria, if she were ever destroyed. But what Palacký has said may no longer be true, because the events of 1914 have created issues and opened up possibilities undreamt of in his times. Palacký, let it be understood, had in mind a Confederated Austria that should form a bulwark for small races against German expansion from the north and the west. It has been intimated that the Allies might agree to create Bohemia and Hungary as independent buffer states to curb German aggression, just as Belgium and Holland are buffer states between Germany and France. If this war has shown anything, it has demonstrated the usefulness of a small state like that of the Belgians. Albania, it will be recalled, had been brought into being by Austria and Italy, not for humanitarian reasons, we may be sure, but to menace and weaken Serbia, of whose growth they were jealous. Another probability is that Russia might demand, as one of the prizes of war, the cession of the northern part of Austria-Hungary, which is wholly Slavic. She might contend that she could not carry out her traditional policy of guardianship of the Slavs, unless her kinsfolk came under her influence, if not actually under her rule.