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Exasperated by this step, the Czech leaders visited Moscow in the same year and fraternised with the Russians, thus showing their hostility to Austria. In 1868 they published an eloquent declaration, written by Rieger, declaring that they would never recognise dualism and emphasising Bohemia's right to independence.
Old Prague, the somnolent city of centuries after Bohemia's freedom went, is regaining her place and rising to her high mission as capital of a free and independent State, the most promising of those that arose out of the ruins of the Habsburg dynasty's dominions.
With Wenceslaus III murdered by an unknown assassin while on his way to Poland, the male line of the Přemysl dynasty died out. It continued in the indirect line by the marriage of Elizabeth, daughter of Wenceslaus II, with Rudolph, a grandson of the Habsburg who dealt the death-blow to Bohemia's native rulers.
Then emerges one Bořivoj, first of that name, who stands out more distinctly against the background of misty legend, probably by reason of his having embraced Christianity; he also embraced a lady, Ludmilla, who became his wife and one of Bohemia's moat popular saints and patrons.
Its immediate effect has been consternation in Vienna and encouragement both to the Czecho-Slovak soldiers fighting on the side of the Entente and to the Czech leaders courageously defending Bohemia's rights in Vienna.
Thus very often these prisoners, who regarded Russia as Bohemia's elder brother and liberator, were sadly disillusioned when they were left under the supervision of some German officers, and thousands of them died from starvation. Nevertheless they never despaired. Eager to fight for the Allies, many of them entered the Yugoslav Division which fought so gallantly in the Dobrudja.
This was undoubtedly their purpose, and it accounts for much of Bohemia's sufferings during the thousand years following the imposition of a German bishop on this country by the German King Arnulf to whom the immediate predecessors of St. Wenceslaus, Spytihnev and Vratislav had appealed for assistance.
Of other Habsburgs on the throne of Bohemia, particularly that lonely bachelor Rudolph II; of his hobbies and the guests and visitors he welcomed to the castle. Of King Matthias and the "Winter King," and how Bohemia's independence was lost on the battlefield of the White Mountain.
This the Allies in their own interests cannot allow. They must insist upon the restoration of Bohemia's full independence. Moreover, as we have already pointed out, her dissolution is a political necessity for Europe, and is to-day already an accomplished fact. The dismemberment of Austria does not mean a destructive policy.
Nor did Ludwig junior ever come to be Kaiser, as his Father and she had hoped; on the contrary, King Johann of Bohemia's people, it was they that next got the Kaisership and kept it; a new provocation to Maultasche.
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