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
