which brought on a fatal brain disease. From Tyrol he was permitted to return home, broken in health and spirit. To the last Havlíček remained steadfast to the cause he had championed—the liberation from bondage of his nation. Havlíček’s colors were red and white (Bohemian national colors), and neither threats nor favors could swerve him from his chosen path:[1] “They banished you from the fatherland,” wrote Pinkas to Havlíček, “but they transformed the fatherland itself into a fortress and a jail. We live here the most unhappy lives conceivable. Not a ray of light enters our intellectual prison to brighten it.”
The mere acquaintanceship with Palacký was enough to expose one to the chicanery of the police. Strobach, at one time Mayor of Prague and a former speaker of the short-lived parliament, was deposed as judge because, when presiding at a trial, he failed to hold a drunkard on a charge of lèse majesté. Count Thun would not allow Rieger to lecture at the university for the reason, as he
- ↑ Karel Havlíček (1821–1856) is in many respects the most note worthy Bohemian of the nineteenth century. As a journalist, he had no equal among his contemporaries. His political articles were models of sound and mature reasoning and of lucid thinking. When arguments failed with the black reactionaries, lay and ecclesiastic, Havlíček employed another weapon with telling effet—ridicule. Bohemians venerate him as a martyr of their cause. The cultured immigrants to the United States from Bohemia in the early days were imbued with Havlíček’s spirit and ideas, and the present-day spread of free thought among them is directly traceable to this Thomas Paine of Bohemia.
