There is no use trying to disguise the situation. It has got to be remedied, although just how the solution will come, very few commercial prophets will be competent to guess. America is bound to help and will unquestionably do so, in spite of the efforts of some of our reactionaries to keep us out of participation in world affairs. But how soon the vanished credit of Europe will reappear and how it will be coaxed back into being, it is difficult to estimate. The inspiring thing about the present chaotic state of European finance and industry is that it must be put straight, and because it must be, it will be. The attractiveness of possible things is not to be compared with the lure of the impossible, when necessity demands the accomplishment of the impossible. But that is a purely American point of view. The American leaps cheerfully to the impossible; the European looks on in dismay and says: “But the effort required is too great! Is it really worth while?”
That seems to me the greatest obstacle to progress in Czechoslovakia today: the disposition to say “It is too much, it is impossible.” This is a much more serious obstacle than Alois Muňa and his bolshevist ring ever were.
Here is one actual case in which I encountered this devastating spirit. I was talking casually with a gentleman of Prague about the railway system of Prague which is utterly inadequate for the traffic. “At least there should be more cars,” I suggested. “If a new type of equipment is impracticable at present, at any rate more of the sort now in use should be ordered.”
“More cars,” said the man, with a comical look of helplessness. “Have you considered, my friend, where these cars could be got today?”
“Right here in Bohemia,” I said. “I have just been talking with a steel mill director who complained that his plant was almost idle because of the lack of orders for car wheels, springs and coupling parts. Other concerns are undoubtedly in the same shape. If electric appliances of one sort or another simply cannot be had, at least trailers could be built. No farther away than Kladno you could get all the iron and steel parts necessary.”
He interrupted me, polite but unconvinced. “But where would you get the money to pay for them,” he asked, “and where would you get the coal to run these additional cars, when you had them?”
I gave him up, just as he gave the problem up. And I had not even told him what was really in my mind: bigger and up-to-date equipment for the street railways and, before long, a subway system, with a main tunnel from the Harrachovo Náměstí under the Vltava and by way of Ferdinandova Ulice to the foot of the Václavské Náměstí, whence one spur would run to Žižkov and Vinohrady, while the other would proceed, via the Powder Tower, to Karlín. On the other side of the river there would probably be two spurs also, one from the Harrachovo Náměstí through Smíchov, and the other to the Hradčany with a station on the summit connected with the tube by a deep elevator shaft. Utopian nonsense this, enough to make the stony countenance of the Jungman statue break into broad smiles. Yet I have just read with interest of how Herbert Hoover brought food supplies to the starving Montenegrins by stringing wire railways up the mountain sides. The difference between the American and the European is that one takes the greatest interest in trying to surmount the insurmountable, while the other, with riper experience and a more mature point of view, is startled by the prospective difficulties of the situation. And the Czechoslovaks are thoroughly Europeans, although probably, no people display greater ingenuity or adaptability outside of their homeland.
Official announcement has been made of the appointment of Dr. J. Štěpánek as minister of the Czechoslovak Republic to the United States. Dr. Štěpánek has been acting minister of foreign affairs at Prague, while Dr. Edward Beneš has been in attendance on the Peace Conference in Paris, and his appointment emphasizes the importance attached by the Czechoslovak government to the Washington post.
Charles Pergler, for nearly a year commisioner of the Republic in Washington, has been selected to serve as minister to Japan. Dr. Osuský, minister to England, is also at this time filling the post of Czechoslovak plenipotentiary at the peace conference, as Minister Beneš has finally returned to Prague, after four years of unexampled activity for his country.
