More than this, the masses of the people in Bohemia are limited and restricted in all their movements in ways of which no one in America who has not passed through the hands of the immigration inspectors at Ellis Island has any comprehension. For example, the people of Austria have had for a number of years freedom of conscience, and, in theory at least, every one is allowed to worship according to his own inclination and convictions. Nevertheless, it seems to be as much a crime in Austria to say anything that could be construed as disrespectful to the Catholic Church as it would be to insult the name of the Emperor. I heard a story of a woman who ran a small store in which she was using copies of a Catholic newspaper with which to wrap up articles which she had sold to her customers. She was warned by the police that if she continued to use this paper for that purpose she would be liable to arrest. Afterward packages were found in her store which were wrapped in this paper; she was arrested and the case was carried to the highest court, but the sentence which had been imposed upon her stood, and she was compelled to serve a term in prison as punishment for this offence. It was only with the greatest difficulty, Doctor Clarke informed me, that he succeeded in getting permission from the Government to establish a branch of the Young Men's Christian Association in Prague.
I myself had some experience of these restrictions when I spoke before an audience composed largely of young Bohemian workmen in the rooms of this same Young Men's Christian Association. In order that I might be permitted to make this address it was necessary to announce the subject to the officers of the Government three days before I arrived in the city, and at the meeting I had the unusual experience of having my words taken down by a Government official who was present to see that I did not say anything that would disturb the public peace.
Not knowing what else I could say to this audience that would interest them, I told briefly the story of my own life and of the work that we are trying to do for our students at Tuskegee. I told them also that the institution (Hampton Institute) in which I had gained my education had been established by the same American Board of Missions which was responsible for the existence of the Young Men's Christian Association in Bohemia.
In order that my hearers might understand what I said, it was necessary for the secretary of the association, a Bohemian who spoke very good English, to translate my words sentence by sentence. In spite of these difficulties I do not think I ever spoke to an audience of labouring people who were more intelligent or more appreciative. It was a great pleasure and satisfaction to me to be able to speak to this audience. I felt, as I think they did, that we had something in common which others, perhaps, could not entirely understand, because each of us belonged to a race which, however different in other respects, was the same in this: that it was struggling upward.
CHAPTER V POLITICS AND RACES
In Prague, the capital of Bohemia, I came in contact for the first time with the advance guard, if I may use the expression, of a new race, the Slavs. I say a new race, because although the Slavic peoples claim an antiquity as great as that of any other race in Europe, the masses of the race seem just now emerging from a condition of life more primitive than that of almost any other people in Europe.
Many little things, not only what I saw with my own eyes, but what I heard from others, gave me the impression, as I travelled southward, that I was entering into a country where the masses of the people lived a simpler and more primitive existence than any I had seen elsewhere in Europe. I remember, for one thing, that I was one day startled to see, in the neighbourhood of the mining regions of Bohemia, a half-dozen women engaged in loading a coal barge—shovelling the coal into wheelbarrows and wheeling them along a narrow plank from the coal wharf to the ship alongside.