A great and still flourishing statesman who dreamed a republic which came true has just set down his dream and much of his autobiography. Simultaneously has appeared a brilliant biography of the late Emperor Franz Josef out of whose realm the republic was dreamed. Both books have much merit:
Masaryk's Dream. Post-War history has already chosen as its darling "The Lonely Slovak in Prague."* With Wilson dead, Clemenceau withered and Lloyd George second-fiddling, it has become evident how great is Professor Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, first and still the only president of the Czechoslovak Republic.
In this volume President Masaryk traces arrestingly the steps whereby he dreamed and wrought his country out of Austria-Hungary. Prior to the War he was, among Czechs & Slovaks at Prague in Austria-Hungary, only a professor, only a deputy. Yet a lionheartedness was in him, and perhaps a serpentine wisdom. By sheer, imperious leadership he welded friends, then students, then political adherents into an orderly group. It stood ready to follow and acknowledge his supremacy when the War brought an opportunity to strike for Czechoslovak freedom. As to just how this vital group was formed Professor Masaryk is regrettably a trifle reticent. He barely mentions by their last names a few of the men who aided him, then hurries on to the statement that "toward the Summer of 1915 . . . my authority was . . . recognized on every hand" among Czechoslovaks.
Meanwhile Professor Masaryk had escaped from Austria-Hungary. His unique distinction was to be that he would achieve the freedom of his people not as a revolutionary from within but as a propagandist from without. Settling first at Geneva and later in London, he wrote and labored unceasingly, with the aid of Dr. Eduard Benes, now Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia. Of him Masaryk writes: "He had great initiative and was an untiring worker. . . . I naturally took the lead. . . . Politically and historically he was so well trained that . . . he was soon able to act for himself." (Thus even today President Masaryk faintly patronizes an assistant who is reckoned as the most able active diplomat in Europe and who was made chairman of an important international committee [See THE LEAGUE]).
Of his propaganda Professor Masaryk writes laconically: "We never bribed." He states that contributions received by him from U. S. Czechoslovaks totaled less than $1,000,000 between 1914 and 1918. Yet with these sums and by his own pamphleteering and lecturing he was unquestionably able to create an Allied and later a U. S. mass-sympathy for Czechoslovakia. One successful move was to exploit the arrest of his own daughter Alice by Austro-Hungarian officials, for "people argued that when even women were imprisoned our movement must be serious. Throughout America women petitioned the President to intervene. . . ."