In many respects the situation of the Slavs in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and in southern Europe generally is more like that of the Negroes in the Southern States than is true of any other class or race in Europe. For one thing, the vast majority of that race are, like the Negroes, an agricultural people. For centuries they have lived and worked on the soil, where they have been the servants of the great landowners, looked down upon by the educated and higher classes as "an inferior race." Although they were not distinguished from the dominant classes, as the Negro was, by the colour of their skin, they were distinguished by the language they spoke, and this difference in language seems to have been, as far as mutual understanding and sympathy are concerned, a greater bar than the fact of colour has been in the case of the white man and the black man in the South. Up to a comparatively few years ago an educated Slav did not ordinarily speak, at least in public, the language of the masses of the people. Doctor Clarke, the head of the Austrian Mission of the American Board in Prague, told me that as recently as thirty years ago an educated Czech did not care to speak his own language on the streets of Prague. At that time the German language was still the language of the educated classes, and all the learning of Europe was, to a very large extent, a closed book to the people who did not speak and read that language. To-day conditions have so changed, Doctor Clarke tells me, that the people in certain quarters of Prague scowl at any one who speaks German on the street. "When we go to visit an official of the Government," said Doctor Clarke, "we usually inquire, first of all, which language this particular official prefers to speak, German or Czech. It is wise to do this because most of the officials, particularly if they represent the central government of Vienna, speak German; but a Czech who is loyal to his race will not speak the hated German unless he has to do so." Doctor Clarke told me, as illustrating the fanaticism of the Bohemian people in this matter of language, that his little girls, who had been educated in German schools and preferred to speak that language among themselves, had more than once been hooted at, and even stoned, by young Bohemians in the part of the town where he lives, because they spoke a language which the masses of the people had been brought up to hate.