survived in one form or another. In my messages to Prague I urged that members of Parliament and journalists should be sent abroad to help me. They were not sent, the work was done without them and, as I saw on reflection, it was better that we should have been alone and obliged to strain every nerve in systematic and united work. The Siberian Anabasis, and many another incident, helped us unexpectedly in much the same way. Going back still further, I often think how unwillingly I left Vienna in 1882 to settle in Prague, what epoch-making plans I then had and how, instead of pursuing them, I was compelled in Prague to study our people thoroughly and to enter political life at an early stage. The whole of life is shot through with paradox. Many a “lucky accident befell me at home and abroad. It was by accident that, after the outbreak of war, I was able to justify my journey to Holland in the eyes of the police and that I had a passport, good for three years, which had been issued just before the war. (It seems that the police superintendent in Prague, Křikava, fell into disgrace because he allowed me to travel abroad.) Only by a lucky chance did I get over the frontier to Italy; the frontier official was very doubtful whether he should let me pass, and before his telegraphic request for instructions could be answered I had got away. From Switzerland I wanted to go home once more and had asked for a visa, but friends in Prague heard, in the nick of time, that I should have been arrested and condemned immediately. Again, in 1916, when I was in London, I was to have crossed the English Channel on the “Sussex”; but the date did not suit Dr. Beneš, who telegraphed me to postpone my visit to Paris. The “Sussex” was sunk by the Germans—the incident evoking an emphatic American protest. When I was going to Russia in the spring of 1917 the ship was only saved from a German mine during the crossing from Scotland to Norway by the Captain’s presence of mind at the very last moment. And by how many lucky accidents did I not profit during the Russian Revolution and the fighting in St. Petersburg, Moscow and Kieff! Were I more superstitious than I am, I might fall into the Emperor William’s error and think myself a special instrument of God. But theological belief, I repeat, ought not to seduce us either into fatalism or into pride, and we should never forget that Providence has to care for others as well. Dr. Beneš is also entitled to claim good fortune. He succeeded in carrying on the work in Prague under the eyes of the police, in organizing the “Maffia” and in crossing the
