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:—
It is remarkable that, when one inquires into this reconciliation and looks for the intermediaries who brought it about, one comes across, almost invariably, a pupil of Masaryk. It is nearly always somebody who, as a young man, once went to Prague, sat in his class-room and, awakened by him, returned home to proclaim the gospel of concord. Masaryk’s pupils have united the Serbs and Croats of Dalmatia and are now bringing that distracted province to have faith in the future—so strong is the influence of the lonely Slovak in Prague who seems to some a mixture of Tolstoy and Walt Whitman, to others a heretic, to others again an ascetic, and to all an enthusiast.
“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
