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-
