Page:The Bohemian Review, vol2, 1918.djvu/187

 son should be given as much liberty as the adult citizen. In both cases people overlook, or rather intentionally will not see, that liberty is something far different from license. Just as protection granted to those who are unable to dispose of themselves rationally is not the limitation, but protection of their liberty, so the principle of self-determination of nations does not exclude the protection of races so backward in civilization that they are unable to make use of the means of progress which the contact of all nations in cultural life affords.

If we therefore take self-determination of nations seriously, we can not compare the status of adult nations of Europe with the status of the wild tribes of Central Africa, just as we do not measure the legal status of a grown man by the restrictions that must be applied to a five-year-old child.

There has been a good deal of speculation as to the real numbers of the Czechoslovak Army in Russia. It is difficult to say what the number is at this time, for recruits are joining it all the time. When this army started on its romantic march in April of this year, it consisted of fifty thousand men, more or less armed and equipped and under thorough discipline. There was fifty thousand more men, prisoners of war, scattered throughout the vast regions of Russia and Siberia, whose applications to join the army had been received, but who were unable to reach the concentration camps. Then there were many thousands more, men who could not make up their minds, but who have since joined their comrades on the six thousand mile march to Vladivostok.

A Bohemian living in Detroit received a letter from his brother who is now in Vladivostok. This letter gives an indication of how the army was growing on its long journey through Siberia. This man says:

“Dear Brother, Sister-in-Law and Friends: I have to tell you that I am no longer at my former station, but that I am now a volunteer in the Czechoslovak Army.

“Conditions in Russia in the last few months be came extremely bad for the prisoners of war. Factories where we were formerly employed are shut down. Men who worked on the big domains have been taken back to the prison camps and the population were told that they must not take prisoners out for work. And then the constant fights in the cities. I was three times under fire, when street fighting broke out without the slightest warning. It was great luck that I escaped alive. Many Russians and prisoners have perished in this way. And then the famine. It was impossible to buy anything to eat in most of the cities, especially no bread. I considered for a long time what I had better do, when the Germans were pouring in on Russia from many directions. If I stayed where I was, I would have been in the midst of fighting, for Russian Red Guards opposed the Germans. Our soldiers were leaving the Ukraine in trains, and the Germans occupied the territory right behind them.

Fortunately I saved some money and had a good deal of warm underwear, shoes, clothing and a fur coat, for I used to travel in cattle cars and on top of coal cars during the severe freezing weather that was in February. My nose and lips were all blistered by frost and I lived on bread and tea. All the time I was going further away from my old place, and wherever I went, there were thousands of Russian soldiers going home and thousands of refugees from territories where there was fighting. In all the cities I looked for a job, but could not get anything. I did not care for the villages; they are not like our villages, just huts made of straw and no chance for work. They do not cultivate the ground as we do.

What should I do? Go home and fight for the German cause? Never that. Since I have to fight, I will fight for our liberty and the liberty of the whole world. As I happened to be in one of the depots a train was going by with our soldiers. In every car was a stove, the boys were singing and in one car I saw a gipsy. Tears ran down my cheeks, when I realized that a gipsy was going to fight for the liberty of my country. In that moment I made my decision. So here I am going again to the battlefields with a peaceful mind.

Hearty greetings from

It is time that the American children should be nurtured in the public schools on something else than the mythology of the Germans. Our educational experts proceed from the theory that American children are all little Teutons, that at the age of eight or ten years they are at the same stage of development as were the grown-up savage Teutons two thousand years ago and that they should learn to look with veneration upon Wotan and the other war deities of the German mythology.

A volume has just been published under the editorship of Louis Herbert Gray containing an account of the Celtic mythology by John Arnott Maccullouch, and of Slavic mythology by Jan Máchal. Dr. Máchal is professor at the University of Prague, and the present work is a free translation of his Bájesloví Slovanské, Prague 1907. Dr. Máchal has been long considered an authority on the beliefs of ancient Slavs and he gives in this book a full account of the deities and spirits worshipped by the various branches of the Slav race, from Bohemia to Russia. It is to be hoped that this book will be the beginning of a sustained interest in Slav mythology and that we shall soon have a book on similar lines got up so as to interest the children.