Vojta [Adalbert] Beneš is the brother of Dr. Edouard (Edward) Beneš, second president of the Czechoslovak republic. He is a schoolteacher by profession, was formerly a resident of Chicago, and is recognized as one of the foremost leaders in the movement for the liberation of Czech lands from Austrian rule.

Four lines of verse of the dismal contents gave the cue to his speech. "These horrible dirges were those that we dreaded so much," he began. "They took the tranquility from our days, they robbed us of our night rest, they destroyed the confidence in our existence. How hard, how painful was life!

"There was no sun for us, and the laughter of our children sounded to us like an ugly jeer at fate. Our Czech national convictions and their spirit--we sunk them into a deep tomb. There were such terrible ideas in the obscurity of the nights during the last three years--not all the time, but frequently. They hovered over the nation like a shroud of despair. There was no East, there was no dawn. Black shadows of death only and graveyard elegies crisscrossed our souls, battering our hopes. We feared that our nation would die just as our poet, Bezruc, sings: 'Night is breaking over my people. We are bound to perish before dawn--.' .....

"Today, on the five hundred and third anniversary of the martyr, John Hus, the loyal Czech-American people are reminded of the past and the present of our nation. After bad nights of doubt, after terrible ordeals and adverse fate which flogged and are still flogging our nation--this nation has risen before the forum of mankind, a big, strong and determined people....."

The speaker holds out hope to his nation, quoting the great Czech poet, Otakar Brezina: "Our victories are the roads to Thee!"

"To him, to our great Jan [John], I turn again with you." The speaker proceeded to depict a time of storm and stress, a period of which the chronicler says: " 'Gold drove out love, the sword drove out the Cross, and Christ was driven from the Temple by a rabble of pharisees.' It was a time of greatest expansion of the power of the church, and of its moral decadence at the same time. The mind of humanity was shackled; blind obedience was demanded, and sheer creed, but no love.....The church was dominated by German influence and filled with German lust for power. It became a political power and its kingdom of heaven became a kingdom of this earth. This medieval combined autocracy of state and church did not want the soul of the nations; it threatened their mental, national, and social development; it threatened the nations and their cultural existence.

"Materialism, which drove out pure religion from the church of that time, and made the latter a mere handmaid of the political power and reaction; materialism represented the values of life. Man, in those times, ceased to be a brother, but became a tool for materialistic conceptions of life. Delight and comfort, gold and incest, became the desirable essence of life. Man was not the image of God any more; life became a valley of tears for some, and a Sodom and Gomorrah for others. Man in the middle ages was born for the church, although the church was created for him. Man was here for the world, and for those who ruled it, who hid behind the cloak of the church of the Lord.

"In this atmosphere of materialism and Germanism, of German conceptions of life, in this atmosphere of irreligious formalism, there met two worlds: the Germanizing world of the powerful which Germanizes not only by the tongue, but by the mind as well; it is the world of the power of the church. The other world is that of the small frightened peasant, of the suffering ones, who, however, feel with the soul of our nation.

"These latter people who worked hard in the fields, who have learned to know the value of bread earned by honest work, have also learned to love liberty of the mind as they saw it in the Scriptures. They learned the value of real Christian life. They were longing for truth, harsh as it may sound, the truth as hard as the soil upon which they worked, and as hard as the callouses on their hands. This was the world of the only truth, it was the world of toil and prayer. In this world, where toil was prayer, in this world John Hus was born, the son of poverty, the son of a small nation, the son of the soil. He was severe, sincere, relentless toward himself and others; a peasant, as they grow up in the southern part of Bohemia. The schism between the Scriptures and life of those times, the abyss between Hus' conscience and the lusting for pleasure and comfort; characteristic of those times, drove him to the stake, into death, a martyr for his convictions........"

The speaker pictured Hus as the protagonist of genuine faith and liberty of the mind, as he stood up for his nation .....

"And yet his nation lost out. After the battle on the Bílá Hora [White Mountain] the nation suffered terribly for three hundred years. There were those who cried out: 'See how far Husitism has led you!' But was it the Husitic democracy that was responsible for the downfall of our nation?"

"The real cause," the speaker continued, "was that the nation strayed away from the great democratic ideals upheld by John Hus. The nation threw away the strong doctrines of pure Christianity, rejected truth, and turned to selfishness and the very materialism against which Master John Hus preached. The greed for gold and the lust for power were contrary to the principles of Hus and the Bohemian Brothers....."

"Today, again the land of our birth is the battling ground of these ideas; our country is again the central point of the strife. 'Between us and the ideas of Austria, that servant of Germany, there can be no peace!' This is the slogan that comes from our Thomas G. Masaryk in Geneva, Switzerland.

It means that we are renewing the old fight, the struggle in which we were once defeated, which we have never lost nevertheless, as it is the fight for the best of mankind. We are happy to again fight for the same cause as did Hus ..... We are fighting in the same ranks with great nations, to the tune of one great song, the Marseillaise of mankind, our battle cry of victory.

"The fate of Bohemia is and shall be the fate and the sign of fight. It shall point to the victory of mankind, and of its soil.

"Autocracy was always outlined by German violence; it is making desperate efforts now before the world to cast off the shameful mark of guilt and reaction. Havlicek says: 'As reaction is a shameful thing, nobody is willing to admit being a reactionary, just as a card shark will not hang out a shingle with his name and profession given as card shark.'

"We are facing the same fight today that our forebears faced four hundred 8years ago. We are fighting Vienna and Berlin now. Medieval heretics have changed into defenders of the Czech nation. The purpose of the struggle is the same--to show whether brutality can destroy ideas and the rights of a nation in its national attitude . . . . ."

The speaker continued by giving explicit explanations on the purposes of the present fight ..... "The German state has become the ideal of the German race. It knows not liberty of the individual, it does not know a happy, inner, and external life, it does not know freedom of conscience, the liberty of a nation. It knows only the liberties which were taken by the Emperor ..... It is not the state of good, straightforward people, a state of nations. What, then, is this state that has become the disaster of mankind? This state is the state of those who govern it, who preach the gospel of force and have rejected the evangel of love; those who claim that right is on the side of might.

"These mighty ones have made a god of the state in order to subject man, as 9a slave, to it, and to those who have re-made the evangel of force into an evangel of God .....

"This is the reason for the miserable life in the strong states, a miserable life for every individual who has no right to think, who has no right to live. It is the state that does the thinking and living for him. The state possibly gives him his daily bread, but takes his brains from him. This state must of necessity be given to materialism, and represent the medieval church, for it is based on force. This is why it creates armies....

"This again is the reason why that state drove other nations into war, so that we are now fighting a battle of life and death.....Our people responded with one breath and in one spirit....."

In describing the conditions in Czech lands at the present time, Mr. Benes reminded the audience of the sufferings of the people. He drew a parallel 10between John Hus and the individual patriots under the Austrian yoke. Hus was branded with the Cain's mark as an heretic; in like manner Czech patriots who stood up for the right of their nation were branded as 'traitors', jailed, exposed to starvation, and sent to the gallows. Many of these men fled their native country, became exiles; others went into battle to die for their country on the side of the Allies.

"The spirit of Hus, that spirit which has been disavowed so often, that viril and strong spirit, that spirit of truth and courage, has uplifted our nation and inspired us to victory! It raised the courage of our whole, undivided people! .....

"My brethren and sisters! I believe that the moment is near when we shall be free from that century-old misery, and that we shall be returned to the majesty of our nation in which we shall find truth, life, and happiness 11for our future generations . . . . ."

The speaker closed in high poetic, awe-inspiring language, voicing his confidence in the re-birth of the Czech nation.