have the reason in a letter which Masaryk wrote in 1898 to Kramář:
You have gone to the right in fundamentals, I have a single psychological explanation (long have I thought of it): that you trust, in fact you really have acquired love for, the dynasty. I do not share this trust and for that reason appear to you to stand "regularly left."[1]
And again a year later:
The main reason is you have a fear for Austria. I have not. Palacky said: "We existed before and will exist after Austria." Even if this were only a phrase with Palacky I want it to be a matter of fact. (There are also such matters of fact.)[2]
It would take us too deep into local politics to explain how these two sincere men, the ablest men that the Czechoslovak nation had produced in the generation before the war, parted company politically. Kramář became the leader of the Young Czechs and gradually evolved a policy,[3] internally, of dominating Austria-Hungary by Slavs or Slavicizing it, and, externally, of divorcing her from the alliance with Germany, and allying her with Russia and France to avoid the Pan-German danger which to every Czech, of whatever political hue, was a reality. He was led to support the dynasty and its plans to such an extent that in 1913 he was forced to resign the leadership of his own party. He necessarily drifted more and more to the right as his plan involved the economic regeneration of the Austrian Slavs within the empire and their participation in obtaining the economic preponderance sometime in the future. He was a Pan-Slavist of the newer more liberal type, called Neo-Slavism, of which he was one of the founders in 1907–1908. But it fell to pieces in several years on the opposition of the reactionary Russian Pan-Slavs who refused to give the Poles the necessary concessions and thus heal the greatest source of friction among
- ↑ Das Verhalten der Tschechen im Weltkrieg, p. 299.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 299.
- ↑ The best sources for Kramář's policies are to be found in Czech Politics (in Czech), Vol. I; {{lang|de|Anmerkungen zur böhmischen Politik (also in Czech) 1906; Tobolka, Z. V. ed. The Trial of Dr Kramár and his Friends. 3 vols. (in four parts). Prague, 1918 (in Czech).
