Page:President of the Czecho-Slovak Republic, Thomas G. Masaryk.pdf/18

 he interceded in the notorious process of Záhřeb, of Friedjung in Vienna and Vasič in Belgrade.

Masaryk was never noisily patriotic, but few did so much thinking about their country and no one of his contemporaries worked so much for the betterment of the nation. And lo, Masaryk was laid hands on most cruelly by the Czech national leaders and rulers. For the first time it happened in 1886, when Masaryk in the name of science demanded that the question of the genuineness of the supposedly old manuscripts of Kralové Dvůr and Zelená Hora be decided. The question was a scientific one. But all those old scholars, who were irritated by Masaryk's directness and honesty, found a much longed-for opportunity to cool their rage on the hard iconolasticonoclast [sic].

"Go to the devil, monstrous traitor!" one of our leading papers screamed at Masaryk. However, it came to be seen that Masaryk would retreat before neither lies nor brute force. His criticism was merciless and annihilating. He did not work with homeopathic doses, but flamed with anger and eloquence. He exalted reason as judge in an educated nation, as opposed to instinct and patriotic tirades,—reason cold but truthful. Of course, a great misunderstanding arose from this. It would be hard to count the wrongs and lies which were hurled at his name: he wrote a treatise against suicide, and was called the Philosopher of Suicide who put a revolver into the hands of the young; he inaugurated his activity at the Czech university with a fight against scepticism and was hissed as a man without ideals, as a nihilist; he asserted himself in Czech public life with an attack on religious indifference, and patriots joined church authorities in declaring him a godless man; as a representative in parliament he opposed Vienna and absolutistic Austria and was hissed as a "kaiserlich and königlich" Austrian; he expounded the philosophy of Czech history and filled the conception of a Czech and a patriot with deep meaning and moral import, nobody went deeper than he to the roots of the Czech question and to the problem of the small nation,—and the idea became current in public opinion that he was a traitor, a cosmopolitan, an internationalist who demanded that the Czech nation cast in its lot with the Germans; and when in 1899 he took a stand against the superstition of ritual murder (among the Jews), defending our honor as an educated nation incapable of such stupidity, it became popular to mouth that Masaryk was defending the Jews (with the implication that it was not done gratis).

Long indeed would be the enumeration of accusations,—but I assert that never was greater wrong inflicted than when this man 10