Excerpt from The Dead Lands of Europe

Have any of my readers ever thought what this means? The United States of America have been founded to maintain the principle of government of the people by the people for the people. There may be populations so ignorant and untrained in political matters that they are unable to profit by a complete system of democratic government, and they may require a transition stage in which the government is in strong hands; but there is no nation so ignorant that it does not require that its own prosperity should be the first Object Of its rulers, and no nation which does not demand complete and full recognition Of its own customs, of its own language, and of its own religion. Have you ever considered what it means that the peasant when he goes into a Court of Justice is allowed at the best only on sufferance to use his own language; that the schools to which his children are sent may be used to destroy in them the remembrance of the great deeds Of their own ancestors and to substi tute for them the language and the traditions of an alien and conquering race? You know something Of what the English nation suffered under the rule of the Norman Conquerors. That which at this moment is being en dured in Eastern Europe is in many ways infinitely worse. The Normans never interfered in the home life Of the English, they never called upon the English to go to war outside the bounds of the kingdom and to risk their lives m a quarrel which was not their own. What these nations have to meet is not merely the carelessness and indifference of a superior social class, but the steady, deliberate, and continued efforts Of highly organised governments to obliterate from the earth the very mem ory of their existence.

That which these nations - the Poles, the Bohemians, the Southern Slavs - claim is in fact the right to exist.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.