Page:Two Architects of New Europe – Masaryk and Beneš.pdf/7

Rh have the reason in a letter which Masaryk wrote in 1898 to Kramář:

And again a year later:

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, 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