The degree of relationship between the Czechs and Slovaks is one not easy to define. According to the one view, which is popular especially among the Czechs, the two peoples represent an original ethnic and linguistic unit--a single race, which through historic accidents came to be separated for centuries and to be considerably differentiated in speech, customs, and character, although always preserving such close linguistic and moral ties that they deserve to be considered as one nation. According to the other view, which is advanced especially by certain Slovak scholars and politicians, the Czechs and Slovaks, in spite of all similarities and affinities, are, and always have been, two distinct and independent branches of the Slavic family, two nations, which have been drawn together chiefly by common misfortunes and common dangers and which may therefore, perhaps, find it expedient to contract a political union. At any rate, the following facts are clear. For many centuries the two peoples have had a common literary language; their writers and scholars long maintained that they were a single nation; and if in the last century an effort has been made to develop a distinct Slovak literary language, it has made no great progress. The two idioms today are so closely alike that the two peoples understand each other without difficulty. Politically, the Czechs and Slovaks have been separated throughout most of their history. After a brief period of union in the ninth and tenth centuries, they fell apart definitively in 1031. The Czechs continued to have a state of their own, the kingdom of Bohemia, while the Slovaks fell under the sway of the Magyars for the next nine hundred years. Nevertheless, geographic propinquity and linguistic, religious, and intellectual ties sufficed to keep up a strong sense of fellowship and interdependence between the two peoples. These feelings have been strengthened in recent years by the conviction that in their struggles against their respective tyrants--the Germans in the one case, the Magyars in the other--they were fighting a common battle and had better stand shoulder to shoulder. And when the World War brought an almost undreamed-of chance for complete liberation, Czechs and Slovaks were wise enough to see that the two peoples, so weak numerically and placed in so exposed and dangerous a position, had little chance of maintaining their independence unless they united. It is true that there has been a certain amount of friction, and that a section of the Slovaks have been protesting against what they call the absorption of their people by the Czech intruders. But this was inevitable. As far as one can learn, the majority of the Slovaks have accepted the union, whether as a marriage of reason or of affection; and the combination is so necessary, if both peoples are to escape being swallowed up again by the Magyars and Germans, that one can only hope that it will last.