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
