Page:The Czechoslovak Review, vol4, 1920.pdf/355

Of all the spoils of war ever brought home by a returning army, surely the most unexpected were brought this spring to Prague with the troops repatriated from Siberia. I mean the 300 children who gradually had been picked up by the Czech soldiers in the course of their troublous five years’ progress across Russia.

The children were of all sorts and conditions, but they were gathered in, because they had in common, hunger and nakedness and lack of all the homely care and teaching which rightfully belong to childhood.

With the human warmth of the true Czech spirit, the army adopted them and shared with them what it had. If food was scant, it was not the children who went hungry. With true Czech common sense, the army cared for them: tailors were detailed to cut over uniforms and make clothes for them, and teachers were found and detailed to keep school and teach letters and behavior.

And so they all came home together,—the soldiers to an old home made free and hopeful by the Revolution in whose success they bore so great a part,—and the children to a new home where they will be given a fair chance in the life of the new democratic Republic.

Perhaps I ought to confess that I failed to see these children. They were lodged a half day’s journey from the city and although we planned repeatedly to take a day for the excursion, it was never possible.

Another war trophy I saw:—in company with a delegation of English journalists, I had the privilege of meeting face to face in their pit in the President’s town garden, the amiable Russian bears brought by the repatriated soldiers as an offering to President Masaryk. The behavior of the bears showed admirable training and I am pleased to say that they paid no attention to the visitors. Plainly Czech common sense saw that the bears were less likely to be demoralized by admiring visitors than were the children and so the children were placed out of harm’s way.

When soldiers on foreign soil show such willingness to take pains for children, it may be expected that the country to which they belong will assign due importance to the protection of childhood, and evidence of Czechoslovakia’s fundamental solicitude for child welfare is found in the provision of the new constitution that “marriage, the family and maternity are under the special protection of the law.” Here, for the first time in the organic law of a country, so far as I know, is the welfare of mother and child expressly recognized as the concern of statecraft.

Like every other war-harrowed country, Czechoslovakia has pressing child welfare problems. If she solves them in the spirit of her Constitution and her soldiers, she will teach the world much. War tries the endurance of civilians in ways never so clearly seen as now, when tables of figures prove the lowered birth rate, the losses of children and of the aged, the impoverishment of the vitality of survivors; when juvenile courts and other agencies report increased numbers of delinquent children, when the long closing of schools of the lack of schools makes illiteracy an alarming evil and when the homeless and war-orphaned children form an army to be estimated by many hundred thousands.

It will not be possible before the census of this autumn to know the precise population figures of Czechoslovakia, with the