our roots—intemperance, self-indulgence in the broadest sense. Czechs, and Slavs generally, bear themselves far better in woe than in weal. They are tender and capable, zealous and inventive, active and tenacious; but they are also sensuous and vain, inconstant, exuberant, and covetous. They find getting easier than keeping ; what they gain to-day is squandered to-day or to-morrow. In placid sensuousness our fair sex knows no bounds. Nowhere in the wide world is the goddess Fashion so passionately worshipped or so many sacrifices made to her. Nor is this a modern trait. . . . Dalemil was the first and Comenius the last to ascribe the downfall of our people to vanity and exuberance. Against these failings King George and other Fathers of the country worked fruitlessly by law and precept. Six hundred years ago the Czechs began to earn and alas! to deserve the nickname of “an apish people” because they aped and imitated everything they saw among their neighbours. In this the Germans are more coolheaded, more sober, more prudent. A German knows how to make a fortune and how to husband it. After having gained a competence abroad he is not ashamed once more to live a peasant’s life in Bohemia. Fond though he is of good food and drink, he looks further into the future and lusts less after dainties, jewels and luxury. . . . The suffocation of national feeling among us is not the only cause of our misfortunes. Other causes are our blind cleaving to home earth, our lack of enterprise abroad, a desire for novelty that seeks rather to enjoy than to create, that is more passive than active, nay, even our easy-going good fellowship that abhors violence and suffers wrong more readily than it wrongs a neighbour. . . . To get rid of this ancient, evil spirit we must first know and recognize its nature, for it is a matter of life and death ; knowing it, means can be found to exorcize it and to save our lives. To this end vigorous will is needed, firm and persistent rather than fiery. Not by noisy raving will it be achieved, only by quiet, true-hearted effort, sincere and steady, as undeviating under temptation as under terror. Reasonable moral education must be brought to a higher level so that our people may understand itself and ensure its future. Any other remedy is but a pitiful palliative. . . . To all patriots I appeal that they should strive to give our people nourishing spiritual and moral food. Then they will muster enough sound sense henceforth to eschew poisonous infections.
The Humane Ideal.
It is no accident but a natural consequence and continuation of our history that our political independence should have been restored in the form of a democratic Republic. Negatively the ground for it was prepared by the loss of our former independence, by our subjection to an alien dynasty and its anti-Czech system, its foreign army, its alien nobility, and a Church that was forced upon us. All these things estranged us from monarchism and its institutions. Positively, too, our past had prepared us for democracy. The foundations of the modern humane and democratic ideal had been laid by our Hussite Reformation in which, as Palacký shows, the Bohemian
