National Council was "a de facto belligerent government." This finished the task.
A National Council had been recognized as a de facto government although neither its offices nor its armies were situated on the national soil. It was a novel event in international relations—an arrangement which had been thought of originally for the Poles, but, owing to the peculiar status of the Polish question at that time, it was first applied in the case of the Czechoslovaks.
In 1919, Edward Beneš returned to his native land. He had left Bohemia in 1915 a professor, so obscure that the Austrian government hardly knew anything about him. He came back four years later as the master-diplomat of Central Europe, having tried his talents with success against the ablest statesmen in Europe. Together with Dr. Kramář, then Premier of Czechoslovakia, he won further triumphs at the Peace Conference, where he was hailed by the late historian of Anglo-American relations, George Louis Beer, as "the greatest of the younger statesmen of Europe." But above all he appeared before his nation as the man who, next to President Masaryk, had helped most to raise the almost-forgotten Czech question from a provincial muddle in Austrian internal politics—which was "nobody’s affair," excepting that of German and Magyar statesmen—to a decisive factor in the international politics of Europe.
IV
It is evident from their utterances and their publications,[1] that President Masaryk and Dr. Beneš hope to assist in the construction of a New Europe in at least two ways.
The first of these is to found in Czechoslovakia a democracy in which the people will be "de-Austrianized and re-educated," in which individuals and classes and nations
- ↑ See especially The Utterances of the President of the Czechoslovak Republic, T. G. Masaryk (Dec. 1918–Dec. 1919). Edited by T. Kratochvil. Prague, 1920, and A Year of Work, Prague, 1919. Both in Czech. These publications were reviewed by the writer in Literary Review (N. Y. Evening Post, November 6, 1920). Perhaps the best of Masaryk's more recent endeavors is his The New Europe (The Slav Standpoint) (1918).
