Page:The Slavs among the nations by T G Masaryk.djvu/35

 They are connected not only by date, but also in the essentials which distinguish them. I mean that magnificent movement of philosophy and of humanitarian morals which preceded the revolutionary shock and resulted in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. This Declaration and its insertion in the constitutional documents of France and America have furnished a juridical basis for the national and democratic movement.

From this movement, moreover, which the Germans term “Aufklärung,” has also come humanitarian philosophy. Voltaire, Rousseau, the Encyclopædists, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, the English moralists, Lessing, Herder, Kant, Goethe—these names are always recurring in the writings of all of our national Slav awakeners, who constantly quote them as authority for their patriotic programme.

Aroused by the great intellectual and moral movement which began in France and Western Europe, the Slavs have faced the obstacles to their national development. Thenceforward we may note among them a strenuous effort to reconquer all that they have lost or neglected,