idealist character, reflected in our history, and represented in each of our great men, that we most resemble our brother Slavs, the Russians. If we remain profoundly Czech, we are also profoundly Slavs.
It would be possible also to deduce this national characteristic of the Czecho-Slovaks from their relations with France. The efforts of John Hus, Chelčický, the Moravian Brethren, and Comenius for freedom of conscience had a direct bearing on the individualistic philosophic movement in France which led to the French Revolution, and which created the France of to-day.
The Czech nation, down-trodden, and almost annihilated by centuries of persecution, found in the French Revolution the philosophy which brought them new life, and enabled them to resist the Teutonic pressure. This national revival in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the work of writers and publicists, the majority of whom were nourished by the idealist doctrines of the French philosophers. The Czech spirit, profoundly idealist and humanitarian, could not but find something akin to itself in French philosophy, full of noble ideals as it is.
It is also well known that in 1848 Palacký, when starting the struggle against the Germans, Austria, and the Magyars, took for his own the great motto of the French Revolution, "Liberty, Equality,
