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.
