complete independence from Hapsburg jurisdiction were overwhelmingly vanquished. On the battle-field of Bílá Hora (White Mountain), Bohemia lost its independence and the devastation wrought by passing and repassing armies in the dread Thirty Years War left the country prostrate for two full centuries. There were no means, in those days, of summoning a sympathetic and open-handed world as was done in 1914 to the aid of a suffering Belgium. Bohemia in 1620 was, like Belgium, the victim of wars in the forming of which its chief crime(?) was its geographical location. But in the seventeenth century, means of communication, of transportation for bounteous supplies to succour the needy were not developed as they were three centuries later when organized relief for a wronged nation was the united response of all but the offenders against international law.
It was in the early days of that period that John Amos Komenský, encouraging his nation to the last, preached a doctrine of universal peace, of settlement of international differences by arbitration instead of by wars, of a peace and joy securable only through the practice of true and genuine Christianity. He urged education for all classes and training of the heart as well as of the mind as a means of overcoming future ills, misunderstandings and national catastrophes. But he was not merely a preacher, he was an enactor of his own doctrines whose efficacy has been proved by three centuries of practice.
