Page:President of the Czecho-Slovak Republic, Thomas G. Masaryk.pdf/21

 that the Battle of the White Mountain could be avenged then or never. The results of his endeavours lie before us: a nation of ten million bows down before Masaryk's work. Whether or not he ever stifled the enthusiasm and cooled the patriotism of Czech youth is answered by the Czech legions in Russia, in Italy, in France and among the Serbs, for these legions are Masaryk's work and the legionaries revere him as a father. There was no fitter man among us to bring about our nation's change of fortune. Masaryk introduced himself as the spokesman of our nation to the leaders of the Entente, and they saw a Czech with a wide horizon, with keen sense, a Czech mastering the world's problems. And that Czech was a man of terrible energy, who in spite of his age did not hesitate to travel over three continents in order to awaken interest in the fate of a martyred nation.

Masaryk returns from exile as the president of the Czech republic. The son of a coachman has come to the Czech throne, vacated by the deposition of the Habsburg dynasty. Masaryk is a man of work, he does not ask for celebrations. He surely did not come to bring inactivity, rest, and indulgence. He will goad us on to work because a great deal is expected from the Czech nation. Masaryk's work among us will continue to be the work of a builder. For we know now finally that T. G. Masaryk from the very beginning was a formative spirit, a builder, a creator. Unrightly was he looked upon as an iconoclast. Every builder who constructs a new building must pull down the old and decayed, and clear away the refuse. And it was upon this phase of his activity that rested the shortsighted and sometimes malignant eyes of those who did not perceive the building. However, from the time of the manuscript conflict, his greater works as they follow one another and also his smaller articles all create new values and positive truths, full of life and freshness. He penetradedpenetrated [sic] to the cause of the tendency to suicide in modern society and offers a cure in religion; he understood the scepticism of the people of today, but tendered objections to Hume; he removed the fictitious poetic halo from Czech history and replaced it with indisputable reality—with Hus and the reformation; had he given nothing more to the nation than the thoughts embraced in "The Czech Question", in "Havlíček" and in The social Question: we should have to admit that he gave every enlightened Czech a guide, and furnished principles and methods for all the national needs that the future may bring or that the present has already brought: the principles of truth and progress, which are the foundation of all that is Czech, and 13