The Making of a State/Introduction

A GENERATION hence, when the war and its antecedents are seen in perspective, who will be held to have won abiding fame? Among military commanders, perhaps Marshal Foch. Among political leaders, perhaps President Wilson. But I have long thought that, when all accounts are closed and all reputations critically assessed, the man who will stand foremost as a creative statesman will be Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, the first President of the Czechoslovak Republic.

Partiality may, it is true, affect my judgment. For twenty years Masaryk has allowed me to think of him as a friend; and though, from the spring of 1907 onwards, I have sought coolly to estimate the man and his work, I may be biased by personal affection and admiration. Yet some knowledge of his deliberate aims and positive achievements leads me to think him peerless among the agents of Destiny who, between 1914 and 1918, wrought in her smithy and forged the framework of Europe anew.

None of the statesmen on either side of the contest entered into it with so keen a sense of its meaning as Masaryk. None saw so clearly from the beginning what its outcome must be if Europe, and all that Europe stood for in the world, were to survive. Where is a parallel to be found to the Prague professor who went open-eyed into exile, determined to return only when he should bring with him the freedom and the restored independence of his own people-a people whose very name was strange to Allied Governments and peoples?

And if, in vision and lofty resolve, Masaryk was thus preeminent, no less notable was he in his divination of the historical forces which the war had brought into play. He counted, as with a practical reality, upon the power of the spirit of John Hus, Wyclif’s disciple, who was burned at the stake for heresy in July 1415. Who, save Masaryk, understood that, in raising the Hussite standard in the Hall of the Reformation at Geneva ​on July 6, 1915, the fourth centenary of the Czech martyr’s death, he was consciously challenging the whole work of the Hapsburg Counter-Reformation and was setting out to reverse the sentence of death passed upon the Czech nation after the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620? Even he could hardly then foresee that the fire of his faith would presently burn in every Allied country or that it would guide the Czechoslovak Legions on their epic march from the shores of the Black to the shores of the Yellow Seas. Nor could he have imagined, when he reached London later in 1915, an almost unknown professor of “enemy” nationality whose doings aroused the suspicions of the British police, that, on his return to England in November 1918, a company of the Coldstream Guards would render him military honours as the head of an Allied and belligerent State.

The thought of personal advantage was ever alien to him. Time and again, in the years before the war, he had risked all to bear witness to the truth. When war came, what stirred him to his depths and possessed him wholly was the idea that, after three centuries of servitude, his people might be reborn to freedom, to spiritual and democratic unity as Hus and the Bohemian Brotherhood had conceived them, and that to him it might be given to fulfil the seer’s vision of his illustrious prototype, Comenius: “I, too, believe before God that, when the storms of wrath have passed, to thee shall return the rule over thine own things, O Czech people!”

Those who may wish to learn the story of Masaryk’s effort will find it in this book. It is truly the story of “The Making of a State,” and of much besides. It is the work of a philosopher-historian, whom Fate made a constructive statesman. His broad learning and sense of history run through it. His analyses of pan-Germanism, of Communism and of Bolshevism are masterly. His critical faculty is ever alert, even when his own people are its object. Written by a Czechoslovak for Czechoslovaks in order that they may learn how they were redeemed, it nevertheless contains so much of enlightenment for others, it betrays so penetrating a discernment of the deep things of life, that it is indispensable to an understanding of the Europe which the war transformed and of the process of transformation itself.

Thus it is no mere literary record of the war, drawn up at ​leisure by one of the chief actors in it. As literature it may have less value than as a living document-or as a monument inadvertently raised by Masaryk to himself. In form, and lack of form, it is a compilation of notes and reminiscences, reflexions and observations, put together while he was actually engaged in building up the State of which he writes. If he has unwittingly raised his own monument he has not built it as a trained architect with a nice sense of proportion and embellishment, but rather as a hewer of stone in a quarry, winning block after block from its reluctant flanks and scarcely pausing to think how best they might be arranged in organic symmetry. Chips and fragments lie all about him; but the stone is there, rough hewn and enduring, raw material for a finished temple of fame. Yet of the temple and of the fame the least careful is he who hewed, builded and writes.

The Masaryk revealed in these pages is a standing refutation of the shallow view that the Great War brought forth no great man. To me, who had experience of the Austria in which he grew up, of the deadening spell she cast over her children, of the Hapsburg system that was a perennial negation of political morality, the emergence of Masaryk seems well-nigh as miraculous as his triumph in the fight he fought, all but single-handed, against inveterate oppressors. Without some knowledge of Hapsburg Austria, the intensity of his repeated injunction to his fellow-citizens can hardly be understood: that they must, above all, de-Austrianize themselves.

To Masaryk and to the Czechs the name “Austria” meant every device that could kill the soul of a people, corrupt it with a modicum of material well-being, deprive it of freedom of conscience and of thought, undermine its sturdiness, sap its steadfastness and turn it from the pursuit of its ideal. Since the Hapsburgs, with their Army, their Church, their Police and their Bureaucracy were the living embodiment of this system, Masaryk, after long hesitation, turned against them and opposed them in the name of every tradition, conviction and principle he held dear. He knew the dimensions of the venture. For his people, the price of failure would have been oppression more fierce, demoralization more dire; for him it would have meant a choice between death on a Hapsburg gallows and life-long exile.

​He knew, too, that Allied statesmen did not, could not, feel as he felt or see as he saw. Genuine though their sympathy might be with the cause he upheld, it was not to be expected that they would pledge their own peoples to support a Quixotic crusade for Czechoslovak freedom, all the less since the Hapsburgs commanded the resources of a powerful Monarchy and might perchance be detached, by political skill, from the Allies’ main foe, Germany. In comprehending their position, despite his own conviction that they were wrong, Masaryk proved himself a greater statesman than they; for an essential quality of statesmanship is the power to understand the position of others better than they themselves understand it. Therefore, as soon as he had given them an inkling of his purpose, he set about making an army. To make it he went to Russia, where the main body of Czechoslovak prisoners of war was to be found. Having made it, he resolved to remove it from the Russian chaos and to place it alongside of Allied armies on the Western front. For this reason, he preceded it through Siberia to Japan and the United States in order to seek means of transporting it to Europe. Before it could reach Europe the war was over. Yet its work had been done. A vagrant professor who could put fifty thousand men into the field was obviously a more considerable personage in the eyes of Allied Governments than the ablest advocate of humanitarian ideals. Thanks to his army in Siberia and to the Czechoslovak Legions simultaneously organized in France and Italy, Masaryk and his devoted helpers, Beneš and Štefánik, won formal recognition for their people as belligerent Allies. They had gained freedom. It remained for them to make a State—a workaday task that might well prove harder than the heroic work of war and revolution.

A man less steeped than Masaryk in the traditions and history of his people, or a man whose authority as a leader had been less firmly established, might have found this task beyond his powers. For nearly three centuries the people, mainly of peasant stock, had been subjugated and Germanized. The native nobility of Bohemia had been executed or driven into exile at the beginning of the Thirty Years War after the overthrow of the Bohemian forces by the arms of the Hapsburg-Jesuit Counter-Reformation at the White Mountain on ​November 8, 1620. Czech lands and fortunes had been confiscated, the Czech language proscribed, the Czech faith condemned, Czech Bibles and books burned and the people themselves decimated. What had been a flourishing State of 8,000,000 inhabitants was reduced to a devastated province with a population of barely 800,000. “Better a desert than a country full of heretics,” exclaimed Ferdinand II of Hapsburg, who followed to the letter the advice of his preachers: “Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron, thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.” Among themselves, their Church and the swarm of foreign Catholic adventurers who joined their standards, the Hapsburgs distributed the confiscated Czech lands. So extensive were the confiscations that an alphabetical catalogue of them, compiled from Hapsburg and Jesuit archives, covers 1,468 pages. No effort was spared to re-Catholicize the nation of Hus. Its fate was what the fate of England would have been had the Spanish Armada triumphed in 1588.

It is sometimes argued that persecution serves to strengthen the persecuted. That depends upon the efficacy of the persecution. The Czech people was re-Catholicized by fire and sword, and its national spirit all but extinguished. Its learned men and spiritual leaders were driven to take refuge in England, in the Protestant parts of Germany, in Holland and in Scandinavia. Greatest among them was Comenius the Educator, the last Bishop of the Bohemian Brotherhood Church. Within the country itself, no breath of life could stir. Yet memories of the past were tenaciously cherished in the hearts of the people; and when, in the “Era of Enlightenment” towards the end of the eighteenth century, the Emperor Joseph II eased the pressure and issued an Edict of Toleration, more than fifty thousand Czech Bibles emerged from secret hiding-places. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic armies stimulated the national spirit in Bohemia as elsewhere. But to such straits were her people reduced that Goethe, who looked upon their efforts with a friendly eye, doubted whether they would ever be able to revive their national tongue. Thanks to a handful of ardent “awakeners,” most of whom were Protestants, the process of rebirth was nevertheless carried on. Palacký, chief among them, expounded the meaning of Czech history and, in the ​spirit of Comenius, taught that through education alone could the way of salvation be found. Throughout the nineteenth century, amid ceaseless struggles with the Hapsburgs and their system, the work of education went on. The Czechs secured High Schools and a University of their own, and established so excellent a school system that, by the end of the century, illiteracy had fallen to a fraction of one per cent.

In the later stages of this educational work, Masaryk himself took a prominent part. Born in Moravia, on March 7, 1850, of humble Slovak stock—his father was a coachman on one of the Imperial Estates—he studied ardently, learning Czech, German and afterwards Polish. Despite the quickness of his intelligence, his parents apprenticed him first to a locksmith and then to a blacksmith, though they presently yielded to the protests of his schoolmaster and allowed him to be trained as a teacher. Thus, in 1865, he began the secondary and university studies which led to his appointment to a minor professorship at the University of Vienna which he held until 1882 when he joined the staff of the Czech University at Prague. Thence his fame as a philosopher and historian quickly spread throughout the Slav world, and, with it, his influence over the younger generation of Czechs and Slovaks, Serbs, Croats and Slovenes of Austria-Hungary. In a description of the reconciliation between the Serbs and Croats of Dalmatia which marked the revival of the Southern Slav movement, Hermann Bahr, the well-known Austrian-German writer, said in 1909:—

“The lonely Slovak in Prague” was a not unfair description of Masaryk in the spring of 1909. His independence of judgment, his strength of character had gained him deep respect but ​few friends. He had once been returned to Parliament, yet had quickly resumed his literary and academic life. Twice he had stood out against public opinion—once when he had exposed as forgeries some “historical” manuscripts which were regarded as Czech national heirlooms; and once when he had fought the battle of a Jewish tramp who was falsely accused of ritual murder. In his eyes, truth came first. Popularity he held of little account.

Returned again to the Austrian Parliament after the introduction of universal suffrage in 1907, as the leader of a tiny group, he speedily became one of the outstanding figures in Bohemian and Austrian public life. During the crisis which followed the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, he was a severe critic of Austro-Hungarian policy; and, in the autumn of 1909, he gave evidence for the prosecution in a libel suit begun by the Serbo-Croat Coalition in the Croatian Diet against the Austrian historian, Dr. Friedjung, and others who, on the strength of official documents, had accused the Coalition leaders of being in the pay of Serbia. The trial proved the Austro-Hungarian official documents to have been forged. Then, greatly daring, Masaryk went to Belgrade to procure the originals of the forgeries and, on the strength of them, publicly indicted Count Aehrenthal, the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister, for complicity in their fabrication. His action did more than that of any man to discredit the Hapsburg system in the eyes of the civilized world.

Yet no man strove harder than he to avert the catastrophe which he felt to be impending. He knew what sufferings it would bring upon his own people, what course it would compel him to follow, and to what risks it would expose him—a lonely professor, past his sixtieth year, without pecuniary resources and an object of official hatred. Though he foresaw that his choice would lie between exile and the gallows, he never wavered or flinched. The Bosnian Annexation crisis of 1908–1909 and its sequel had convinced him that the Hapsburg Monarchy was doomed; that its policy was leading straight towards a European war in which victory would make of it a mere vassal of Germany while defeat would sound its death-knell; and that the fate of his own people hung in the balance.

​Conscious of their peril, the majority of Czechs placed their hopes in Russia, counting that she would not again submit to humiliation such as she had suffered at the close of the Bosnian Annexation crisis and believing that she would never allow a Slav people to perish. Masaryk thought otherwise. Unlike his fellow-countrymen, he knew Tsarist Russia through and through. He did not await Czech national redemption at her hands. The Czechs, he held, must work out their own salvation in the spirit of Hus and of the Czech Reformation. He believed in democratic freedom and moral uprightness as twin factors in national rebirth, and he could not imagine that either would be fostered by Russia. A nationalist he was, in the sense that national freedom seemed to him an indispensable postulate of the international cooperation for humane ideals of which he dreamed; but in his nationalism there was neither vainglory nor racial intolerance. Here, again, he was at variance with other prominent Czech leaders, if not, indeed, with popular feeling.

With the outbreak of the war came the call to action. In December 1914 he escaped from Austria to begin abroad, primarily in the West, his fight for national redemption. In this book he tells the story of his struggles, and recounts his steps along the stony path to triumph, for the enlightenment of a people still largely ignorant of the means by which its freedom had been won, still bearing, in spite of itself, the Austrian stamp on mind and body, still unaware of the political and moral demands of independent national life. It is as Masaryk’s testament to the nation that his book must be judged, not solely as a history of the making of a Czechoslovak State.

In Bohemia and Moravia, indeed, the framework of public administration, if not of a State, was already in existence. It had been taken over from Austria, with all its defects. But, in Bohemia especially, there were some 8,000,000 Germans, historically Bohemian and, in any event, too important, too wealthy and too educated a minority not to be accounted first-class citizens. Could they be reconciled to Czechoslovak rule? Would they, who had been the spoiled children of Austria, resenting every economic or educational advance of the Czechs ​as derogatory to the privileged German position, be satisfied with a position of equality, or would they look upon it as a species of persecution?

To the East, some millions of Hungarian Slovaks had joined the Republic. They had long been oppressed by the Magyars, deprived of education and deliberately kept in a backward, nay, a primitive condition. In general culture and political maturity they were decades, perhaps generations, behind the Czechs; and, despite the presence of a Protestant leaven among them, they were apt to be fanatically Catholic and priest-ridden.

Still further to the East and extending to the Roumanian border were the Ruthenes, or Little Russians, of what had been Hungarian Ruthenia. Now, as an autonomous “Sub-Carpathian Russia,” they had adhered to the Czechoslovak Republic. If, in point of general culture and political maturity, the Hungarian Slovaks were decades behind the Czechs and Germans of Bohemia and Moravia, the Ruthenes were decades behind the Slovaks.

Upon all these difficulties Masaryk touches with discerning hand. He looks upon them as aspects of the great moral and educational task that awaits his people. Few of his pages reveal his mind so clearly as those in which he examines the entire problem of democracy and of fitness for a democratic system of public life. He treats it as a whole, not exclusively in its relation to Czechoslovakia. Against autocracy or dictatorship in any form he sets his face like flint. The cooperation of enlightened peoples for the realization of a humanitarian ideal is still his chief aim. But he is no visionary. Rather is he a practical mystic. He is fully alive to the world-wide significance of the new order in Central Europe. He knows that it stands as a political barrier against any revival of pan-Germanism, that is to say, of German ambitions to attain political mastery in Europe and the world. He sees that such ambitions could not be fulfilled without a fight to the death in which Europe herself might perish; but he believes that there may be found a more excellent way of merging national aims in a higher synthesis of international endeavour. In this endeavour he wishes his own people to play their full part, drawing inspira​tion from the heroes of their own history and from the spirit of their Reformation. After having led them from Hapsburg servitude to the green pastures of freedom, he would fain teach them the Law and show them that it is written in the story of their past. The examples of Hus and of Žižka, of Chelčický, Comenius and Palacký he holds up before them as worthy of reverent emulation.

Not least does he set them, albeit unconsciously, the example of his own life and work, a life of utter devotion to truth and to truthfulness, of steady faith in an ideal and of self-sacrifice for a cause transcending any individual aim. If he be a mystic, if religious feeling penetrates his every fibre, the story of his achievement stands as proof that, when a man seeks righteousness for its own sake, other things shall be added unto him. Having vindicated the faith of Comenius, he hands it on as a greater testament to the people he redeemed, a testament written in every line and between the lines of one of the most notable interpretations of past and contemporary history.