Page:The Czechoslovak Review, vol3, 1919.djvu/306

 12 would be declared elected. The remaining fraction of 5000 votes would be combined with similar fractions from other districts by a central election commission, and this commission would assign to the parties one or more places, so that even a very small party with votes scattered throughout the republic would get representation in parliament, if it received altogether one three hundreth part of the total vote cast, the number of deputies being 300.

While this plan might not commend itself to America, it suits conditions in Czechoslovakia, where there are many parties and several nationalities all claiming parliamentary representation. By this plan the German minority will have just the strength in parliament to which its numbers entitle it; so will the small Magyar minorities in Slovakia be given opportunity to elect their own deputies, and even the Jews, should they decide to run Jewish nationalist candidates.

A somewhat similar system of proportinal representation has been employed at the recent municipal elections in Czechoslovakia and has been found satisfactory. It is expected that the government franchise bill will soon be enacted into law in substantially the form in which it was submitted to the National Assembly.

1em

An important part of our revolutionary activity against Austria and for Czechoslovak independence consisted in carrying on an underground information service for our people through word of mouth, written, hectographed and even printed circulars, and later by a sort of a newspaper typed or hectographed in hundreds of copies. Our regular newspapers could not speak the truth, but the journalists did what they could by twisting the official reports, by artful choice of headings, by the arrangement of war bulletins so as to bring out their contradictions, in short they schemed over reports, handed to them from the Vienna official press bureau, in order that a skillful touch here and there might suggest to the readers the real situation. Finally items of importance to Czechoslovaks were squeezed in frequently in such a manner that they escaped the attention of men who censored each issue before publication. There was developed in this field a really remarkable technique of getting the best of the censor.

No one man can be said to have been the author or director of our internal propaganda. It was carried on from various directions, each independent of the other, in all kinds of ways, according to the ability and ingenuity of the actors engaged. To give a full account of this secret activity would mean collection of a great deal of material and must be left to the future. Sometimes a very simple lampoon, a joke passed on from mouth to mouth in the trenches or in the endless lines waiting for bread, did more to strengthen the determination of the Czech people to oppose the Hapsburg tyranny than the cleverest piece of writing in the Prague dailies.

From the very outbreak of the war the Czechs saw the enemy not in the Allies, but in the Germans. Artificial Austrian patriotism forced upon the people only excited sarcasm; jokes were made about reports of victories that nobody believed in; songs and stories making fun of Francis Joseph and William spread from Prague to the utmost corners of Bohemia. Soon reports were current contradicting official bulletins, reports of French and Russian successes, of German and Austrian savagery, and of other matters which those in power wanted to keep away from the people. The more the censor raged, and the tighter were frontier restrictions, the better thrived various rumors and grew the distrust of all official announcements.

These original weapons of propaganda were not forged in some central workshop; the people themselves picked them up wherever they had the opportunity. There were constantly fresh songs, jokes, parodies, stories; God knows, where they all came from. Their crop grew especially after the famous Austrian strategical movements to the rear. Apprentices from a trade continuation school extemporized a “patriotic” demonstration; they marched over the