and warmth into their weary lives and raised their moral standard by giving them an impulse to greater care for their education. In the course of time this care developed into an extensive activity which embraces already at present a great percentage of our freshmen, preparing them for future life by strengthening their physical and moral powers.
To the freshmen special and reserved hours for exercises are devoted; a specially appropriate system of exercises is adapted for them; excursions, expeditions public performances are arranged and, on the other hand, lectures, books and publications especially devoted to their interest go far toward raising their intelligence and improving their character.
The same may also be said of the school children, especially where their physical education does not receive proper care and attention in the schools. In this effort the Sokols had to overcome serious obstacles which were put in their way by the suspicion and rancour of the educational bureacracy in Austria; from this the schoolchildren suffered great damage.
The bureaucracy pointed to a difference of gymnastics for men and for children, although Dr. Tyrš’s ingenious system, in its frame, offers room enough for exercises convenient and accesible to every age being opposed to any soulkilling, dull and dry—as—dust, gymnastics which rendes the exercises insipid and repulsive to the youth and drives him from the gymnastic halls into sport of a kind which overstrain his powers.
After man woman had her turn. The physical education of the nation must also encompass in its sphere the woman who is endangered by the same social conditions which permeate all classes and bring their influence to bear upon the development of new generations. The Sokols, therefore, very soon opened their gymnastic halls to the other sex and permitted the formation of separate gymnastical departments for women, thus giving an impulse to extensive work in this province. These departments occupy at present a condign place side by side with the men’s and complete the efforts of the Sokol societies by spreading among their families a sense for sound education and for the Sokol duties.
But the Sokols did not stop in this exclusive sphere of activity; the unceasing efforts, the systematic straining of energy to attain the aims of physical education were naturally folloved by the results in other parts of our life and its work, the manly spirit, cultivated by exercises the personal courage relying on its own strength, the power of endurance and resistance acquired by a daily training of the minds of the young men to a further improvement and steading of their character.
