Explore "A Year of Prophesying" by H.G. Wells on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Bohemia within its mountains is like a square citadel in the very centre of Europe. Czecho-Slovakia, the old Bohemian kingdom revived and extended, is the most orderly and successful of all the States created by the Treaty of Versailles. The republic understands the modern need of advertisement; the wandering writer finds a flattering welcome there, and what is done in Prague is heard of in the world.
The new treaty with France brings Czecho-Slovakia still more prominently forward. Poor exhausted bankrupt Poland, that sucked orange, is thrust aside, and Czecho-Slovakia becomes the keystone of France's restless incessant rearrangement of alliances. But Czecho-Slovakia is a very different country from Poland; it is sturdier and less romantically inclined, its President and chief Minister are among the most level-headed and far-seeing of European statesmen; and it is likely to prove a sobering and restraining influence upon French activities. Bohemia is the projecting westward angle of the Slav world; its language is closely akin to Russian, Serbian, Polish and Bulgarian; within its boundaries there are more than three million Germans, and three-quarters of a million of Magyars, and its natural destiny seems to be that it should act as a region of exchange and interpretation between the Slavic world, Hungary and Turkey, and the world of Central and Western Europe.