Of the new states created by the Paris treaties, Czechoslovakia has had the most uneventful existence and is by all odds the most flourishing. In fact, it is the only one of the Succession States to the Hapsburg Empire whose political and economic life is functioning normally. When one arrives in Prague, one is immediately struck with the naturalness of the new régime. It is as if it had always been. And when one goes to the Burg and visits the offices of the new Government, which has now been functioning under the control of the same men for nearly five years, there is no feeling of coming into contact with something parvenu or inchoate or absurd. Across from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs workmen are busy on the cathedral. “When was this started?” I asked. “We have been working on this addition--in reality it is the main part of the cathedral, you know--for six hundred years.” Nothing illustrates better the spirit reigning to-day in Czechoslovakia. Freed from a bad dream, the old Kingdom of Bohemia is taking up once more the problem of playing an independent rôle in central Europe. An American in Vienna told me that Czechoslovakia was “a Bologna sausage impossibly sprawling across the map,” and expressed in no uncertain terms his belief in the approaching collapse of a country “without natural frontiers and economic or geographical _raison d’être_ and made up of a congeries of races among which the Czechs are in the minority.” An Austrian cabinet minister added, “The old racial and irredentist problems of this part of the world were not solved by the treaties of St.-Germain and Trianon; they were only transferred from Vienna to Prague.” If one considers the question of the viability of Czechoslovakia from the strict point of view of geography and ethnography, there would indeed seem to be little hope for the future of this curiously composite state. Czechoslovakia is long and narrow, and part of her frontiers are arbitrary. Out of a population of less than 13,000,000, there are more than 3,000,000 Germans and nearly 1,000,000 Hungarians. Ruthenians or Ukrainians number 500,000. And there are Jews and some Poles. Whether the Czechs are outnumbered by “alien races” depends upon the classification of the two other branches of the Slav family in the body politic. Are Moravians and Slovaks different people from the Czechs? Even if they be counted as the same or similar, possessing common historical traditions, using kindred languages, sharing common aspirations, and being willing to throw their lot in with the Czechs, there is a difference in culture--a striking difference. The Slovaks and the peoples of other regions ceded by Hungary to Czechoslovakia contain a large percentage of illiterates. The Czechs in the Kingdom of Bohemia are virtually all literate. The wife of a cabinet minister told me that she had never in her life met anybody who could not read and write. What American could say the same?