I am writing this however for my good friends, the Czechoslovaks. They will understand, for they have gone through a different kind of schooling. Misfortune has been their constant companion and adversity has been their faithful teacher. They realize that they will never get anything except what they shall be able to acquire by the sweat of their own brow. They do not expect that liberty will come to them neatly done up in a little bundle and with the compliments of a few well-intentioned citizens in a foreign land. They know that freedom without which their nation cannot live, will have to be the result of their own endeavors and having learned from the experience of the past, they understand that the soul of a people is not expressed by vital statistics concerning its balance of trade but that it lies hidden where no one can touch it—in the soul of its artists and writers and philosophers.
The world has long since known about the glories of Czech music. Just as two hundred years ago the name Bach came to stand for that of a musician, so the very word Bohemian had long since become identified with excellence in composition or in the handling of a bow or a pair of vocal cords. And if anyone doubts the good right of the Czech people to learn their language at the knees of their mothers, he only need open his ears. The composers of the old land of Bohemia will tell him so, and in terms that cannot possibly be mistaken.
It had been somewhat different within the realm of the pictorical arts. We were familiar with a few names, but with only a few. For the painter cannot spread his fame as easily as the composer or the singer or the fiddler. A Dvorak or a Smetana can be heard in a thousand different places on one and the same evening. A painter, working for the here and now can only display his genius in a single spot. A private collector may be the proud possessor of one of two Kokoschka's or Stursa's or Maratka's, but no matter how generous he may be in sharing his treasures with his neighbors, only a handful of people at a time can enjoy the sight of these products of the brush and the pencil.
It therefore seems not only a wise but an absolutely necessary decision to bring together into one single space as many of the evidences of the Czech genius for painting as could be found in that rapidly dwindling part of the world as yet unaffected by the defiling touch of the Nazi hand. In the meanwhile, everylthing that can be done should be done, to keep their holy cause before the public at large. For this time, peace will not be entrusted to the sort of men who gave us Ver-
