First and foremost, it should be observed that a strictly ethnographic frontier would have given an almost impossible and fatal configuration to Czecho-Slovakia. Even as it is now constructed, this state presents a somewhat fantastic appearance on the map. It looks like a tadpole. It is a narrow couloir about 600 miles in length, but in its eastern districts hardly 60 miles wide; and in Moravia, the province which forms the link between Bohemia and Slovakia, it is only 100 miles across. Now, if the frontier had been drawn on the ethnographic basis, these defects would have been aggravated in very dangerous fashion. Prague, the capital, would have been brought within about 30 miles of the German frontier. The Moravian link would have been little more than 50 miles wide. The state would have been constricted in the middle until it had much the shape of an hour glass. Czecho-Slovakia occupies a very perilous position. It is a wedge thrust into the side of Germany. For a thousand years the Czechs have been engaged chiefly in beating off the German onslaughts, and it is to be feared that in the future they will not be free from the same danger. Surrounded as they are on three sides by Germany and German Austria, they would, indeed, be in the gravest peril if, in case of a conflict, their enemies needed only to join hands across a gap 50 miles wide in order to cut the Czecho-Slovak state in two. If this state was to be created at all, it had to be created in a shape that would give it some guarantees of viability.