Relief Work
We talk about high prices in America. High cost of living is the most common topic of conversation; it is also the source of more jokes than any other subject, since mother-in-law was invented. We think it terrible that we have to pay two dollars, where formerly one dollar did the work. But few of us really experience any hardship because of the increased cost of living, and probably none of us has to deny himself a square meal on that account.
How different is the situation of our kinsmen in Czechoslovakia. If the price of the necessities of life were only double of what it was before the war! What a sigh of relief would be heard all over the land; how all their troubles would seem to dissolve into the air and disappear! The fact unfortunately is that most of the articles of consumption have multiplied their price ten times and more, partly because of depreciated currency, partly because of the lack of commodities or the difficulty of bringing them into the country. And while the income of the people as a whole increased two or more times above the pre-war standard, it lags woefully behind the price index. A cabinet minister draws a salary of 65,000 crowns a year; even if we refuse to be guided by the abnormally low value of the crown which would make his pay in American dollars less than one thousand a year, yet there can be no doubt that he is not as well off as a machinist in the United States. Regular professor at the University of Prague, and that means a scholar of considerable distinction, gets some 20,000 crowns a year, less than an office boy in an American factory. It is the same with all the learned professions: plain living and high thinking go together in Bohemia nowadays.
High governmental officials, professors, lawyers and their kind have not asked for charity, though God knows they seem to need it, if we judge their mode of living by our American standards. But think of the people who are considered poor over there, the laborers, the clerks, even the country school teachers; think of the people who have no work and try to live on the government pittance to the unemployed: then think of the hundreds of thousands of widows who lost their husbands during the war, and more hudreds of thousands of children without fathers or mothers, children who hardly know, how milk tastes, who have never seen an orange and know candy only by sight! We wonder how all those multitudes manage to keep alive, when flour is scarce and high, potatoes beyond their reach, meat not to be thought of, coal as precious as diamonds. It does not help the situation to remember that in comparison with the misery of the poor in Vienna, Budapest or Warsaw the poor of Prague may be said to be well off. There is a tremendous amount of human suffering just now in Czechoslovak Republic; there is also a great work of mercy going on to relieve this suffering, inaugurated largely by Americans and still supported to some extent from America.
Of course relief of the needy did not wait for the coming of the Americans. From the first day of the war there have been countless cases, where those comparatively well-to-do shared their little with those who had nothing. But organized relief work was long made difficult, if not impossible, by the existence of the Austro-Hungarian Red Cross which monopolized all public and private gifts by a system of governmental terrorism and used the funds to keep up pro-war and pro-Austrian sentiments among the beneficiaries. Not only was the noble name of Red Cross prostituted to mean ends in Austria, but there was actually extensive grafting going on in the headquarters, where titled ladies held the reins.
To all Czechs the very name of Red Cross was hateful under the Austrian regime; they organized their own war charities in the fourth year of the war, charities on a small scale, because the sum of misery was altogether too large to be attacked in its whole extent; they got up the Czech Heart, an organization for the placing on farms of city children who were dying because of lack of milk and decent food. Properly speaking it sould be said that one woman organized this whole charity,—Růžena Svobodova, poet and novelist and a great heart. The whole nation wept, when this woman died suddenly on January 1, 1920.
