A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
AWELL-KNOWN Czechoslovak citizen who has spent the last ten years in England says that in that time quite a number of people have discovered that Czechoslovakia is not the name of a patent medicine or a contagious disease. A very much larger number, it may be added, have not dis- covered how the country's name should be spelt. That is a more serious matter than it seems, for to write (incorrectly) " Czecho-Slovakia " is to play straight into the hands of anti-Czechoslovakian propagandists in different countries, who delight to distinguish between Czechs and Slovaks in order to claim that Czechs are no more than a dominant minority in their own land. Actually there is less difference between Czechs and Slovaks than between English and Scots, and Czechoslovaks number (according to the States- man's Year Book) 9,688,770 out of a total population of 14,729,536, or over two-thirds. That standard work of reference of course uses the spelling " Czechoslovakia " and so does Whitaker ; so does the Encyclopaedia Britannica ; so, among daily papers, do The Times, the Daily Telegraph, and the Daily Herald. It is not surprising that the Daily Express and the Daily Mail prefer " Czecho-Slovakia," but it is surprising that Liberal papers like the News Chronicle and the Manchester Guardian do. By dropping the hyphen they would help a country which in other ways they con- sistently support.
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