English Translation

50a - 4 knew neither a spiritual nor material /ristocracy, but only the successes of his own work and effort: the perfect bourgeois equality, the moral and social balance, the democratic action of the offices, in which he himself chose judges and teachers, tax collectors and sheriffs from his fellow citizens and to whom he was then elected, all this approached him immeasurably the democratic institutions of his new fatherland. The more he hates the past, which missed all this, where out of misery and moral humiliation, out of bureaucratic domination and false piety was nothing that would evoke his memories of the Austro-Hungarian state. Under these influences came the Czechoslovak Nebraska, the Moravian Texas, the Slovak Pennsylvania with flourishing settlements, a wealth of soil and trade, with developed banking, so arose also the Czecho-Slovak Chicago; all the decent economic wealth of our Volk in America. Although the Americanization of the national colonies in the first generation did not succeed, the inner Americanisation of the mind was very rapid and effective. In linguistic terms, our emigrant adapted all the more slowly, the smaller his intelligence was. It is, by the way, a natural phenomenon, known from all countries of national oppression, that intelligence is most rapidly denationalized. It is and cannot be otherwise in America than that the ability and speed of assimilating one part of the height of the culture that assimilates, on the other hand, also corresponds to the cultural height of an element that is to be assimilated. Since the Anglo-Saxon element was too foreign in the first time of the stay, due to its habits and views of emigration, the emigrants were strongly dependent on each other and tended to redeem national colonies, which in turn were a will to protect against the overpowering Americanization, this was not only on the farms, but also in the cities: the need to manage own schools in the country, church councils, own relief institutions, in the community and district - 5 -