As for the effect of the fall of Prague on the position of the Slavonic races in Austria, they were deprived by that event of their last help of a free centre of national life round which their race could gather. For Prague had supplied such a centre in a way in which none of the other Slavonic capitals ever could supply it. Its fame rested on a past, which was connected with struggles for freedom against German tyranny, and the leading facts of which were clear and undisputed; while its geographical position prevented it from coming into collision with the other Slavonic races. Agram and Carlowitz might at times look upon each other as rivals; but Prague had no interest in preferring one to the other, or in destroying the independence of either, while the connection in language between the Bohemians and the Slovaks of North Hungary ensured the sympathy of the former for any attempts at resistance to Magyar supremacy. Lastly, wedged in as Bohemia is between the Germans of the Archduchy of Austria, and that wider Germany with which so many of the Austrians desired to unite, it could never cherish those separatist aspirations which would have prevented Lemberg, for instance, from ever becoming the centre of an Austrian Slavonic federation. Thus the fall of Bohemian liberty prepared the way for a complete change in the character of the Slavonic movement. The idea of a federation of the different Slavonic races of the Empire might be still cherished by many of the Slavonic leaders; and, for a short time, the struggle of the Slavonic races against Magyar and German supremacy might retain its original character of a struggle for freedom. But it was unavoidable that this movement should now gradually drift into an acceptance of the leadership of those courtiers and soldiers, who hated the Germans and Magyars as the opponents, not of Slavonic freedom, but of Imperial despotism. FOOTNOTES: [11] Rakoczi is still to a great extent a national hero among the Magyars, as is shown by the name of the Rakoczi March, which is given to one of the national airs; for the Magyars, in the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, were willing to risk the separation of Transylvania from Hungary if thereby they could secure an independent background to their struggles for liberty against Austria, much as the Venetians in 1859 were thankful for the liberation of Lombardy from Austria, though it involved the loss to Venetia of fellow-sufferers under Austrian oppression. [12] English readers may be reminded by this scene of that fiery debate on the Grand Remonstrance, when the members of the House of Commons would "have sheathed their swords in each other's bowels, had not the sagacity and great calmness of Mr. Hampden, by a short speech, prevented it."