"Go out of Cracow to the border and look across, and you will see order on that side and disorder on this. Step into a German train; it is clean and efficiently managed, while our cars, from the first-class to the third, are dirty and ill-lighted and the trains go by fits and starts. "Go to the German towns, and you will find business flourishing; while ours stagnates. They don't neglect art, either. Their music may be slower than ours, but it is art; their paintings may not be as brilliant as ours, but they are as artistic. Go to work! Do something worth while! Build from the foundations! Develop some backbone, some character, do better than the Germans, and then you may call them names!" The sensitive nostrils of the husband grew wider and contracted again. He was furiously angry; but facing him was his Americanized wife, and he knew that "Discretion was the better part of valour"; so he permitted his anger to cool while he nervously bit the ends of his moustache. "Yes," he said, ignoring the Countess' outburst; "there is a great future for us Slavs when we all get together. We were in Prague this summer, at the Slavic Congress, and everything between us was so harmonious that I have great hopes of a Slav Confederation. Then we will crush our German oppressors. What do you think of it?" I analyzed the situation thus: "As yet, the Slavs lack racial consciousness. Each group, no matter how small, thinks itself different from the other, and often superior to it. Not only are they divided by small historic dissimilarities, but religious differences have obscured racial unity to such a degree that I have but little hope that their racial consciousness will soon ripen into tangible results. "In the great game of politics, the Slav has given his soul as a pawn, with which popes and patriarchs have gambled. Poland's national life has been lost, not so much by corruption from within, as because the Pole was used as a tool by the Roman Curia in the game of world politics she was playing, and playing unscrupulously." Ah! It was good to see the Countess' dark eyes dancing from pleasure, while I thus analyzed the situation. I continued: "The Slav either lacks sane pride in his race, or he has an overbearing conceit; he is either easily crushed, or he crushes, ruthlessly. Look at this daily paper. In Dalmatia, the Serbs break the windows of the Italians, and tramp madly through the streets proclaiming their superiority over the Latins. In Laibach, the Slovene does the same thing to the Germans. Tears down German business signs, shoots, and is shot in turn. In Prague, the Czechs are constantly bombarding the houses of the Germans, until martial law has to be declared. All this, to the detriment of the development of a rational, racial pride. "And these same boisterous, roistering Slavs, to-morrow will cringe before their Magyar and German masters.