Struggle there is everywhere. Those who are too weak to fight, resist, and none, however small or unimportant, is ready to surrender. Among those people with strength enough to resist, but not enough to fight, are the Slovaks, who live in wretched villages on both sides of the river. The villages grow more wretched as they climb away from the richer valley to the scant clearings in the mountains, where poverty, ignorance, superstition, and intemperance are the four walls which hem them in from the throbbing life of the century and shut them out from it. No one climbs the almost impassable highways except the Magyar gendarmes, who are the minions of the master race which has subdued the Roumanians, Ruthenians, and Germans within its borders, and is now hard at work to blot out the Slovaks, the feeble remnant of a once powerful people. These gendarmes are but stupid tools in the hands of a stupid government. They erase the Slavic names of villages and paint over them Magyar names, not even remotely related to the original; they prohibit the Slovak language in the higher schools, fall savagely upon assemblies of innocent folk and disperse them by force of arms, annoy unsuspicious travellers and arrest nationalistic agitators and severely punish them. Then they believe that they have changed sluggish Slovak blood into the fiery Magyar fluid, obliterated age-long, historic memories, created in a day a new patriotism, blotted out a vernacular spoken in related languages and dialects by 100,000,000 of people and substituted for it one spoken by a warlike people, numbering not more than 8,000,000, and slowly emerging from Asiatic barbarism. This they believe; but the fact is that no people were ever assimilated by force. Force begets resistance, and the most stupid Slovak, shut in by the four walls of his wretched isba, if he knows nothing else, knows that the Magyar is his enemy, and that the Magyar speech must not lodge in his memory and displace his mother tongue. Although he may have no knowledge of his historic past and no idea of the significance of the Slavic race of which he is a member, he _does_ know that he must resist the Magyars, and resist, only where he cannot fight. Two forces are at work which will soon turn this resistance into fighting. One of them is the unbearable and unreasonable methods used by the Hungarian government, and the other is that giant in the growing, the returned immigrant.