With extraordinary obstinacy and patriotism these peoples cling
to their old language and customs. They have suffered much
during this war and many tales are told of the shooting of all of
the officers of Tchech regiments and the execution of every tenth
man among the privates.

It is a bit of poetic justice that the town of Bethlehem in
Pennsylvania, where my friend Schwab is making so much war
material to be used against the Central Powers, was founded by
fugitives, who, rebelling against oppression, left Moravia in
search of liberty.

North of the Carpathians lies Galicia, a Polish country, with
Lemberg and Krakow as its capitals, and in the eastern part the
Ruthenians, a race identical with the Russians. These Ruthenians
number upwards of four million.

It is a peculiar fact that in the curious Dual Monarchy each race
oppresses some other. The Ruthenians complain that they are
oppressed by the Poles. The kingdom of Hungary lies to the east
of Austria containing in its twenty million inhabitants about ten
million Magyars, who are the dominant race and who in turn rule
over a population of one and one-half million Ruthenians, two and
one-half million Slovacks or Tchecks, three million Roumanians in
the southeastern portion and about three million of the race now
known as Jugo-Slavs. Of these Jugo-Slavs about two million are in
that part of the Dual Monarchy under Austrian rule. These are the
principal divisions of peoples. A Slavish race differing somewhat
from the others is in the mountains to the east of Hungary where
much fighting has taken place in the last war known as Boukovina.
In the southeastern part of Hungary there is a German speaking
country, known as Siebenburgen, where live the descendants of a
German colony planted about two centuries ago.

In Styria, in the mountainous districts of Austria to the west of
Hungary, lives a race differing again from all the others, a
mountain race supposed to be eaters of arsenic, a drug which they
believe gives them a good complexion and stamina for mountain
climbing. It is said that the bodies of these arsenic eaters
remain undecomposed for a long time. And from this part of the
world comes the curious superstition of the existence of human
vampires.

Slovenes, and Jews, Carinthians and inhabitants of Carniola, Serbs
living like Moslems in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Italians in Trieste
and the Trient--all make up the strange Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

The