Page:Three stories by Vítězslav Hálek (1886).pdf/299



OW occurred in the farm house a trying period which it is a painful task to have to chronicle. And it is the more painful, because in the Loykas’ farm may be seen a picture of a hundred other farms in which similar scenes are enacted, only slightly differing in their details.

It is, perhaps, the most painful thing for a writer when in his pursuit of truth he has to delineate nauseous realities.

Among all social questions there is, perhaps, no single one which can elicit in men so profound a sentiment of indignation as the question of the vejminkar (pensioner).

We need not go beyond the confines of Europe if we wish to discover slaves and slave masters. We have them at home, each of us in his own village, and what is more disgusting is that the son is the slave master, the father is the slave; and what is still most disgusting, the law sanctions this relation, approves it, ay, incribes it on the public rolls like a commercial treaty. The greatest popular immorality is carried on before our very eyes, nature debauched