Page:The Bohemian Review, vol2, 1918.djvu/7

 the most of the president’s language, taunting the poor Slavs with their reliance upon foreign statesmen who only use the Austrian races as pawns in a game. If the Slavs and Latins of the Dual Empire become convinced that the Allies are indifrerentindifferent [sic] to their fate, could we blame them, if they made terms with their German rulers?

Intimations are heard now that the Allies, probably through the mouth of President Wilson, will restate their war aims, in reply to the German-Bolsheviki peace terms. Surely it is not possible that they would say less than they did a year ago when they promised to liberate the Slavs, Italians, Roumanians and Czechoslovaks from foreign domination. But pending any such authoritative pronouncement, a resolution passed in the Congress of the United States declaring the Slavs and Latins of Austria to be friends will encourage wonderfully the dejected spirits of the victims of German-Magyar oppression. It is time for America and her Allies to realize that they have little to hope from the ruling races and from the emperor of Austria, but that thirty-two million Austro-Hungarian subjects will use every means to further the cause of the Allies, if only they feel sure that the Allies will not abandon them in the end.

Let America declare that while it considers Germans and Magyars, the two nations of oppressors, to be her enemies, it looks upon the Slavs and Latins of Austria-Hungary as friends.

J. F. S.

The Bohemian peasantry, whose chief occupation until the middle of the nineteenth century was agriculture, created for themselves on the basis of old traditions an original style of arranging their homes and their costumes, with their own poetry, music and dances, customs and ceremonies. All these may be considered to be the artistic side of the Czech peasant culture. They exhibit in a striking manner the national characteristics in art and industry.

The loss of Bohemia’s independence and the determination of the government to make Germans of the people were the causes that alienated the great mass of the population from the cultured classes. These latter were educated in German schools and forgot their nationality, as well as lost their individuality. But the country people continued to live their own old national life. Even during the centuries of serfdom the peasants of Bohemia were owners of the soil they tilled. They possessed so much innate energy and creative powers as to make for themselves sufficiently cultured and artistic surroundings and thus raised themselves above the dreary monotony of daily drudgery and preserved their national character.

The state of civilization just described belongs to the past. The upper classes of the nation are once more in sympathy with the people and aid powerfully in raising the intellectual standard of the country and in recruiting from the masses the best artists and men of letters. They now regard the traditional art of the peasants with pride as their own inheritance, and see in it as well many links that bind together the various branches of the great Slavonic race.

More than fifty years ago the peasants of Bohemia began to discard their pretty showy costumes, and only in the southern parts, far from the industrial centers and the high roads of commerce, have the forms of ancient life been preserved. Thus on the Bohemian border in the outhwest, where the people are called the “Chodové” or marchers, because they had to patrol the borderland between Bohemia and Bavaria, the old-time customs and the wearing of national costumes continue to a considerable extent up to the present day.

From 1880 upwards memorials and relics of national art have been collected with great care. The Ethnographic and Historic Museums in Prague and in almost all the larger towns in Bohemia possess great collections of embroideries, suits of national dresses from various parts of Bohemia and Moravia, home pottery, furniture and other implements, painted Easter eggs, toys, manuscript prayer books adorned with miniatures and drawings, etc. Folklore, national art and culture are the objects of intense study of a considerable number of literary