first at the University of Vienna and then at the University of Prague.

As a teacher, as a professor, he now accomplished many years of sheer scholarship. He laid out the paths and the fields of his encyclopedic knowledge. He reached into the theological controversies of the France of the seventeenth century and wrote a book on the writings of the French philosopher Blaise Pascal. He reached in to the sociological controversies of his own century and wrote a book on the statistics and on the moral causes of suicide. His chair at the University of Prague was a chair of philosophy; but, more precisely, it was a chair of applied philosophy. In Masaryk's hands the subject of applied philosophy seemed to be a distilling and condensing of all other known subjects. And then he was elected, in 1891, to sit in the Parliament at Vienna for a Bohemian district.

It may seem strange that such a man, studying logic and Pascal and suicide in a university, should be urged by his fellow-citizens to serve them in public life. But in Bohemia it aroused no comment of surprise. The Bohemians do not look down upon a man because he is a professor. On the contrary, they look up to him. And the natural result is that men worth looking up to are more likely than they otherwise would be to become professors and to be

come the intellectual leaders of the nation. And it happened during the war that all three of the managing members of Bohemia's Provisional Government were professors.

This Provisional Government was brought into existence at Paris. Masaryk was its head. Professor Bennes, also of the University of Prague, was its secretary. And its vice-president was Dr. Milan Stefanik, an astronomer, director of the observatory near Paris at Meudon. Stefanik became also an aviator in the course of the war, but his occupation was the mathematics of the sky. And to these three scholars the whole Czecho-Slovak nation and the whole Czecho-Slovak army gave an implicit political obedi

ence.

But it was not an obedience of ignorance. There were no illiterates in the Czecho-Slovak army. From top to bottom that army was an educated army-so much so that Masaryk did not bother to protect it by censorships from German and Bolshevist "propaganda."

At Kief the Bolshevists wished to address the army of the Czecho-Slovaks and convert it. Masaryk told them to proceed. For several days they harangued and argued, publicly and privately, in perfect freedom. At the end of that time, out of an army of fifty thousand men, they took away two hundred and

fifty converts. Masaryk was rid of two hundred and fifty unreliable soldiers and he had forty-nine thousand seven hundred and fifty soldiers left whose minds as well as whose bodies were utterly ready for every possible attack.

Among such a people, so given to argument and to respect for argument, Masaryk became a politician, a Member of Parliament, quite naturally. But he soon retired from Parliament. He had not found the political party, he had not found the intellectual movement, to which he could give his full support. And he determined to make an intellectual movement and to make a political party of his own. And to this labor he now gave another long term of years.

He wrote books, and he inspired newspapers and periodicals, and he delivered lectures, and he gathered up his interpretations of the history and of the religion and of the industry and of the national character and destiny of Bohemia into a movement which he called the Realistic Movement and into a party which he called the Progressive Party. And the question he always asked was:

"What is there in Bohemia which makes it worthy to live again as a nation among nations?”'

The great German historian, Mommsen, visiting Austria, had said:

"In order that the Germans may drive on toward the east, it is necessary to break these Czechs."

Masaryk inquired:

"If the Czechs should be broken, what would be lost?"

And he wrote his works on "Jan Huss" and "Karel Havlicek" and "The Czech Question" and "The Soul of the Nation" to make all Czechs see what would be lost and to give them their reason in their instructed hearts for surviving. And it was necessary for them to live up to that reason. For, as he said to them:

"You were indeed a nation once. But if you would not die, there must be something-some old thing or some new thing, or some old thing and some new thing put together, which you can give the world. You can live only by giving it.'

And he saw in Bohemia an instrument for the whole world against autocracy. Hedged in by the three autocratic Governments at Vienna and at Budapest and at Berlin, the Bohemian people by history and development were and are a democratic people. And he made his party a party friendly to democracy, to democracy not only political but industrial. He made his party the most industrially democratic party of all the Bohemian middle-class parties. It stood between the middle-class parties and the parties of

the workingmen. And, in 1907, sixteen years after his first entrance into Parliament, he returned to Parliament from the district of Valassko as leader of a practical political enterprise which he had created out of the world of books and pictures and poems and statistics and working-class manifestoes and medieval religious wars and modern novels and religion and music. He boldly said:

"Politics is the sciences and the arts.'

And he made his saying good. He continued to represent Valassko in Parliament without opposition. The Social Democrats would run a candidate against him for form's sake; because their constitution demanded it. But there was no genuine opposition. His place in politics was uncontested and secure. He began to be called "the conscience of Bohemia."

And the war came.

At once the leaders of various political parties in Bohemia met together to choose one of their number to go into the countries of the Entente and to be the representative there of all Bohemia and of all Bohemian difficulties and aspirations. They chose Masaryk. On him the middle-class parties and the working-class parties, confident of his fairness, could unite. And he got across the frontier, with one of his daughters, and proceeded to France and to Italy and to England and began his great mission.