On the other hand, despite the large minorities, Czechoslovakia has an excellent chance of lasting and, by a steadily increasing prosperity, making her unwilling citizens content with their lot. Czechoslovakia is the only new state formed wholly out of the Hapsburg Empire. Prague does not have the problems of Bucharest, Belgrade, and Warsaw, where peoples separated through centuries and impregnated with different cultures and radically divergent political ideals and political experience have been brought together under a new roof. Not a portion of the Czechs but all of them have had political education and have been familiar with suffrage and parliamentary life. The Czechs had their quota of functionaries in the Hapsburg Empire, which gives them trained men for government service. Without intending offense, one might say that the Czechs are the most promising of the newly emancipated people because they are German-trained in public life, administration, and education, as well as in business. They possess a German mentality--in the better sense of that term--and this is the reason they have made such wonderful progress in five years and present to the visitor the picture of a state functioning without confusion and possessing all that makes for durability. From large portions of Jugoslavia and Rumania it is going to take a long time to obliterate the four centuries of subjection to Ottoman rule. Rumania and Poland have elements that remained for centuries under the Russian yoke. Bohemia was in slavery, but gentle slavery. The Slavs were discriminated against, it is true, but not in a way fatal to their cultural or economic development. The country was not partitioned, and Austrian rule could not be compared with that of Turkey or Russia. The territories that go to make up Czechoslovakia shared the prosperity of the last half-century of the Hapsburg Empire, and they contained--already developed--factories, mines, and agricultural and forest industries second to none in Europe. Mark the words “already developed.” When you go to Bucharest or Belgrade or Warsaw you are told what the people hope to do, and the potential wealth of the country is impressed upon you. Foreign capital is essential, and there is the constant anxiety that its introduction be not accompanied by political subserviency to the great powers and economic dependence upon them. But at Prague you do not have to visualize the future. The actual wealth of the country and its existing machinery for production are sufficient guarantees of its ability to live alone. Railways do not have to be built: they are already there. Men do not have to go through the painful stages of learning parliamentary manners, and officials are not running around madly with more good will than knowledge. Czechoslovakia is the one going concern created by the Paris Conference.