CZECHOSLOVAKS IN AMERICA
two or three times a week, as need appeared, what were called bulletins, mimeographed. These were articles of an anti-German and anti-Austrian nature, reports of conditions among Czechs and Slovaks, of their struggle for independence, formation of their legions, historical surveys of the treatment of Czechs by the Germans and the dynasty in Austria, of the Slovaks by Magyars, etc., etc.
Almost the first of these articles attracted some attention. There had been called in New York, in May, 1917, what was called the Emergency Peace Conference, by a pacifist group. The director of the bureau received an invitation to participate in the conference and responded in a letter declining to do so and describing the general Czech position, as well as taking the attitude that the preponderance of right was on the Allied side. It was in this letter that the expression appeared that war for democracy, or at least in advance of democracy, is preferable to the peace of a graveyard. The phrase caught the imagination of some editors. Thus the New York Globe published the document verbatim , as did the Milwaukee Journal. Because of this, and because it furnishes an illustration of war-time political methods and views of certain organizations, this
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