III. Csech Characteristics—Professor Masaryk—Jan Huss—Slav Puritans—The Hradćin—Modern Politics. I. Roughly speaking the Group of the Northern Slavs includes twenty million Poles and eight million Csechs. Numerically, therefore, they are the greatest of the unliberated Slav peoples. Bohemia and her sister-country Moravia are under Austrian rule, while Poland has been dismembered and partitioned between Russia, Germany and Austria. At one time both countries were great and flourishing, and played a prominent part in history. In 1526 the Csechs acknowledged the Hapsburgs as their ruler,[6] and Bohemia’s political decay and gradual loss of independence date both from this point. The first partition of Poland in 1772 deprived the Republic of liberty. Her dismemberment was finally completed and sealed by the third partition in 1795, and henceforth the Poles were even deprived of the possibility of co-operating as a nation. The Csechs and Poles have both passed through a national tragedy, but of the two the Polish tragedy makes a stronger appeal to the imagination, because of the contrast between their former greatness and their present position, the high level of their culture, and the lofty principles at stake in the Great Polish Revolution. The Poles fell victims to the foreign yoke just as their civilization, their culture, and their _esprit_ were on the fairway to rival the intellectual splendours of France under Louis XIV. They were a brilliant people—mentally and intellectually refined, but physically decadent, and quite incapable of surviving their political freedom. They yielded to listless sentimentality and bewailed their lost greatness instead of fighting to retrieve it. You may love the Poles with your _heart_ but never with your reason! In this they are the very antithesis to the Csechs whom you cannot love except with your reason. You may admire them for the culture they have so laboriously won, but you cannot love them for it.