and has been instrumental in promoting the issue of Czech translations of standard works, and in the establishment of a library of French. English, and Russian authors.
A Czech nationalist at a time when the present expansion of Czecho-Slovak power and the sudden collapse of German dominion in Bohemia could not possibly be foreseen, his idea was that the Czechs must be under no illusions as to their strength. He considered that a population of ten million Bohemians face to face with seventy million Germans, must look to cultural and economic forces for the maintenance of a substantial independence. Owing to his unflagging insistence upon these considerations, his party was termed the Realist Party, and the movement of which he became the head was known as "the realist movement." For some years before the war, his moral influence in the Czech lands had been unrivalled. He was considered to be the one man who could speak to Europe on behalf of his nation, was looked upon as the prime initiator of his country's national rebirth.
In Austro-Hungarian politics he was a federalist, believing that reorganisation on democratic lines could secure peace and satisfactory development for all the nations under Austro-Hungarian rule. Elected to the Reichsrat in 1891, he was a consistent opponent of the Germanisation of Bohemia and of the antinationalist activities of the Austrian bureaucracy in that country. No less zealously and acutely did he criticise Austro-Hungarian policy in Bosnia-Herzegovina. During the first years of his parliamentary activities he wrote The Czech Question, a political catechism expounding the role of the Czech nation in European history. The Czech question seemed to him an international one, but at the same time he regarded it as the very kernel of the Austro-Hungarian problem. The key-note of his political outlook may perhaps be formulated in a single phrase, in a prophecy more than once enunciated,a peculiarly fortunate venture in the prophetic field. "Austria must completely modify her internal structure, or she will be erased from the map of Europe."
Definitely espousing the Allied cause in the summer of 1914, Masaryk necessarily became an exile from his own land, and was for a time a refugee in London. This is not the place for an account of his recent activities in connection with the Czecho-Slovak movement, but we may fittingly record that as we write these lines news comes to hand that the author of
