that I made some of my best friends. The Bohemian peasant is a very much more interesting type than your citizen of Podunk, U. S. A., whose chief intellectual interest in life consists in going down to the railway station “to see the train come in.” The Czech villager likes to dance and sing, and is in his element in social gatherings. He is usually well-posted, too, on all the legends and tales of history which concern his neighborhood. If there is an old castle in or near his town, he is particularly eager to have you visit it, and what he does not actually know about it he can frequently make up.
This brings me to another characteristic of the people as I saw them, but I approach it with a certain amount of reserve and a feeling that I am treading on ground that is not very familiar to me. If there is one quality of the Bohemians that Americans may find hard to understand, it is their pre-occupation with the past. They have a passionate interest in the history of their nation that we, in spite of our undoubted admiration of the Revolutionary heroes, know nothing about. A Praguer talks with as much fervor about Charles IV. and the days of Žižka, as a Chicagoan displays in describing the electrification of the Illinois Central or the proposed widening of Michigan Ave. People born west of the Atlantic are much more interested in future things than those that have already passed into history. My friends in Czechoslovakia may have been interested in the future, but they were easily sidetracked when discussing it and diverted to enthusiastic accounts of events that transpired in the fifteenth century. More than a few times I have been perplexed by this habit of looking backward. For instance I asked about the probable continuance of the unemployment wage and was told the story, how Charles IV. built the “Hunger Wall”. I do not know, whether this reveals a national failing or whether it merely shows an aptitude for profiting by experience which we Americans patently lack. I only know that it was a very obvious thing to me and one that always interested and sometimes baffled me.
There, is another respect in which the Czechs—and as far as that is concerned, most European nations—differ radically from Americans. The best description of the dissimilarity was given me by a prominent Bohemian-American who came across the seas, when he was very young. We had been talking about the charms of life in Prague and I had said that the Bohemians seemed to get more out of life than New Yorkers and Chicagoans, and that I thought I should like to go back some day and live there for a long time. He looked sceptical and sighed:
“Yes, some day,” he said, “but only when I am rather old and want to take life in a very leisurely way. Bohemia is not really the place for any young man.” He shrugged his shoulders. “There is not enough opportunity, and the mass of the people lack initiative.”
That is perfectly true. Compared with the business life of any American city, the commercial activities of Prague are lackadaisical. Shops and offices close for two and sometimes three hours in the middle of the day; the entire tramway service occasionally ceases to operate in order that the motormen and conductors may have a meeting, and the revision of railroad time schedules is delayed for weeks and months simply because the public does not care enough to make a vigorous protest. That this state of affairs is not due to an inherent weakness in the nature of the people is shown by their brilliant success in business, when they are transplanted to this soil. It must be, then, the result of the central European system and traditions. There is a general stagnation of enterprise, and the Great War has multiplied this evil a thousandfold. Right now, when there is the greatest need for alertness and energy, there appears to be the greatest lassitude and indifference. The prevailing feeling is one of discouragement. Capitalists look aghast at the wreckage of industry produced by the war and wonder helplessly, whether it can be set right again within the lifetime of any man now living. They see railroad communications destroyed, telegraph wires down, raw material unobtainable and markets problematic and inaccessible. On the other hand, labor looks on doubtfully and says: “Reconstruction is not our affair. That is the job of the capital. In the meantime we must live and you must pay us good, fat wages. If I choose to work, well and good; if I don’t, the government must help me out. What else is a government for?”
