WHAT HAVE THE BOHEMIANS ACCOMPLISHED AS A NATIONALITY?
It may be well to quote on this subject a paragraph from an American author, Robert H. Vickers (History of Bohemia, 8°, Chicago, 1894, p. 319):[1] "The fixed rights, the firm institutions, and the unfailing gallantry of Bohemia during eight hundred years had constituted a strong barrier against the anarchy of the darkest ages. The manly independence and the solicitude for individual political rights always exhibited by the Bohemian people have rendered them the teachers of nations; and their principles and parliamentary constitution have gradually penetrated into every country under heaven.
"They protected and preserved the rights of men during long ages when those rights were elsewhere unknown or trampled down. Bohemia has been the birthplace and the shelter of the modern politics of freedom."
But Bohemia has also been for centuries the culture center of central Europe. Its university, founded in 1348, at once for the Czechs, Poles, and Germans, not only antedated all those in Germany and Austria, but up to the Hussite wars was, with that of Paris, the most important of the continent. In 1409, when the German contingent of the university, failing in its efforts at controlling the institution, left Prague to found a true German university at Leipzig, the estimates of the number of students, instructors, and attendants who departed average over 10,000.
WYCLIFFE ENCOURAGES THE CZECHS
Sigismund, the emperor and deposed king of Bohemia, in writing of it, in 1416, to the Council of Constance, says "That splendid University of Prague was counted among the rarest jewels of our realm. . . . Into it flowed, from all parts of Germany, youths and men of mature years alike, through love of virtue and study, who, seeking the treasures of knowledge and philosophy, found them there in abundance."
Last, but not least, Bohemia led in the great struggle for freedom of thought, religious reformation. Encouraged by the writings of Wycliffe, in England, and by such meager sympathy from continental Europe as they could obtain in those dark times, the Czech puritans, regardless of the dire consequences which they knew must follow, rose in open, bold opposition to the intellectual slavery in which nearly the whole of Europe was then held. They paid for this with their blood, and almost with the existence of the nation; but Luther and a thousand other reformers arose in other lands to continue on the road of liberation.
For a small nation, not without the usual human faults, and distracted by unending struggles for its very existence, the above contributions to the world during the dark age of its rising civilization, would seem sufficient for an honorable place in history.
THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CZECHS
As to the modern achievements of the nation, they follow largely in the footsteps of the old. Notwithstanding the most bitter struggle for every right of their own, the Czechs have extended a helpful hand to all other branches of the Slavs, in whose intellectual advance and solidarity they see the best guarantee of a peaceful future. They have extended their great organization Sokol, which stands for national discipline, with physical and mental soundness, among all the Slavic nations, and they are sending freely their teachers over the Slav world, and this while still under the Habsburgs.
To attempt to define the characteristics of a whole people is a matter of difficulty and serious responsibility even for one descended from and well acquainted with that people. Moreover, under modern conditions of intercourse of men and nations, with the inevitable admixtures of blood, the characteristics of individual groups or strains of the race tend to become weaker and obscured.
Thus the Czech of today is not wholly the Czech of the fifteenth century, and to a casual observer may appear to differ but little from his neighbors. Yet he differs, and under modern polish and the more or less perceptible effects of cen-
- ↑ See also W. S. Monroe, Bohemia and the Czechs, Boston, 1910.
