The voice that extolled racial patriotism had first been heard across the Austrian frontier from Frankfort, Germany, in 1848, when a parliament that had been summoned to that city called on Germans to unite. Promptly the Slavs took up the idea of unity and as a retaliatory measure summoned a Pan-Slavic Congress to meet in Prague. It was on the occasion of the Prague Congress that Francis Palacký addressed his famous letter to the Frankfortists, explaining why the Bohemians and other Slavs were opposed to the incorporation of Austria in the future Germany. “The aim which you propose to yourselves,” wrote Palacký, among other things, to Frankfort, “is the substitution of a federation of peoples for the old federation of princes, to unite the German nation in a real union, to strengthen the sentiment of German nationality, to secure the greatness of Germans without and within. I honor your resolve and the motives by which you are impelled, but at the same time I cannot share in your work. I am not a German, or at least I do not feel as if I were one. Assuredly you cannot wish that I should join you merely as a supernumerary with neither opinion nor will of my own. I am a Bohemian of Slavic origin, and all I possess and command I place wholly and forever at the service of my own country. It is true that my nation is small, but from the very beginning it has possessed its own historical individuality. Its princes on occasions have acted in common with German princes, but the people have never regarded themselves as Germans, nor have others, during all these centuries, included them amongst them.” It, therefore, sounds very much like irony to hear Germans from the Fatherland censuring the Austrian Government for allowing the national movement among its Slavs to spread as it did. What the Austrian nations really did was to follow the advice of their Germanic tutors and awaken racially.