English Translation

53 -6 Despite the great influences, the American* did not change democracy the spirit of the people/volcanoes.The spirit of general negation, by which life : u home characterized through hundreds of years, this entity often consumed everything beautiful among the compatriots was born or could be born in the New World. The Czech free-thinking also did not take a deeper look at the question of religion: from Klácel green, then led by Zdrubek, it found its continuation in Dr. Iëka, and although Iška's influence did not include the American East in particular, the American free-thinking was rather a nega- tive movement of nothing giving denial, there was not much for life to reject all religious ideas, it was almost infertile. It left the life of the free-minded Czechoslovak people as a desert without fertile impulses. When at its head also people without moral principles stood, when they filled the atmosphere of public life with meanness and heresy as well as with their spiritual waste, ed- le people breathed freely enough in the Czech milieu and many of them were lost in the sea of strangers, to the detriment of ours. But perhaps because of the long years of harvest, the soul of our free-thinking countrymen was waiting for the moment of creative work, for the liberating word to escape the empty and useless denial of life, in order to find its meaning and its great creative moment, in which she too, who so often disappointed, so much under, longing for the spirit and the soul fluctuating in heart, finds the meaning of her eternity. Whether it was the Sccolen or Dr. Blaho among the Slovaks, Habrman, Klofáč, Dr. Soukup or Drs. Velemin- ský, Pelant or Bartosek, these visits became oases over the years and decades. Our evangelical compatriots also welcomed excellent preachers from the homeland, there came Prof. Žilka and others, but the greatest influence on all emigration without distinction had been the visits of Professor Masaryk. As if a happy fate in the course of times - lo -