CZECHOSLOVAKS IN AMERICA
garian) rule even more than the Czechs did under the Austrian régime. But no one can gainsay that in potential capacity there is no difference between the Czechs and Slovaks.
The great part played by the Czechoslovaks of America in the liberation of their native land can only be properly understood if we bear in mind the character of the Czech and Slovak population in the United States. The winning of independence of any nationality is the result of interplay of various political, social, and economic forces, and the future historian, in appraising the importance of the several constituent parts of the movement for Czechoslovak independence, will not assign to American Czechoslovaks an insignificant role.
The plain people , as Lincoln would have called them, constitute, of course, the vast majority of Americans of Czechoslovak origin. It is a tribute to their sound political instincts, and to their political maturity, that upon the outbreak of the war they at once, and spontaneously, took a position which events have proved to be in the right, and which, in the end, prevailed. The general idea obtains that the Czechoslovak movement for independence was wholly of European origin and
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