T. G. MASARYK

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 20103, 9 May 1935, Page 6

T. G. MASARYK

PHILOSOPHER AND PRESIDENT MAKER OF A NATION There stands hewn in stone for all time, so long as a Czechoslovak State endures, the inscription “T. G. Masaryk has deserved well of the State.” It is the expression of undying gratitude from the nation which he recalled to life after many hundred years of oblivion. To-day, says a writer in the “Manchester Guardian,” he is an old man who still has the elasticity of youth and of whom it is not easy to believe that he is half-way through the eighties. To talk to him of the torturing problems of our day is to be fascinated by the clarity and acuteness with which he penetrates the bewildering mass of conflicting tendencies and draws their lesson for himself and his contemporaries. Every child in his country knows his life’s story—born of poor parents, his father a coachman, his mother a cook, and brought to fame by sheer hard work. Chance brought him his opportunity :he met the none too brilliant son of the Brunn police superintendent and became his tutor. He went with the boy's family to Vienna, and there the world opened to him. At 32 lie became a professor in Prague University. Already he had formed the programme that was to be the centre of his activities for over thirty years, that of the liberation of the oppressed national minorities of Europe. A Plain Citizen During the years of the World War he endured an interminable odyssey, at times in danger of his life, with adventures that drove him almost all over the world. At a banquet in New York at the end of 1918 he received a telegram from his country announcing his election to be its President; he quietly put it in his pocket, without a word even to his neighbours at the table. So he has remained—composed, temperate, moved only by the great ideas of all ages. Forty thick volumes, now being issued in a collected edition by his secretaries, testify to his creative intellectural activity. The kindly old man, in his simple dwelling in the President’s wing of the fortress on the Hradschin in Prague, will not be altogether comfortable about the great celebrations of his eighty-fiifth birthday. All he wants to be is a plain citizen among his countrymen. Probably he will do as he has done on other birthdays. He will have some of the poorest of the Prague children as his guests, will fill them with heavenly quantities of chocolates and cakes, and will speak a few serious words to them, as he did to schoolchildren who came recently to do honour to him; “Soon, dear children, you will be grown up and fathers and mothers yourselves. So, treat your' parents as you would like your children to treat you. Treat everybody as you would like them to treat you. We are all equal, we must all be equally free, we must not do violence to anybody. Perhaps one of our future Presidents, will be speaking to children here in thirty or forty years’ time- Tell them that all that time ago we were with the first President and pledged ourselves with him always to follow the principle of our forefathers, that ‘the truth wins!’ ”

Masaryk is by a bizarre chance Hitler’s next-door neighbour in Europe. Thirty years ago Masaryk was combating anti-Semitism and racial anarchism as “an outrage on common sense and humanity.” He makes his stand in spite of wild attacks on his person and threats of physical violence; “No follower of Jesus can be an antiSemite. . . . Christian or anti-Semite — no man can be both.” Twenty-five years ago, as a deputy in the Austrian Parliament, he said: “Chauvinism is itself characterless, without principle. Every lout will be to the Chauvinist’s taste; he demands racial purity, conformity of conscience, but conscienceless people are good enough for him if they will but betray their fellows!”

He has given this survey of his long life:

“If I am to say what has been my supreme satisfaction In life, if I may so call it, it is that as head of the State I have made no material abatement from what I have believed in and have loved as poor student, as teacher of the young, as an inconvenient critic, as a reformist politician; I have now in power no other relation to my neighbour, to the nation, and to the world than those which brought me here. lam able to say that everything has been fulfilled and confirmed in which I have always believed, so that I have not to alter in any way my belief in humanity and democracy, my search for truth, or the highest ethical and religious command. ... I can tell myself that in this ever-endur-ing straggle for a better future for the nation and for humanity I have been on the right side. This consciousness is enough to make a man’s life beautiful and, as people say, happy.” Even in these day he is convinced of the final victory of freedom. Not long ago he said; “I regard Fascism as an ephemeral phenomenon of our transitional age. That transition period began at the moment when human liberty became a practical conception. After the World War it brought us Fascism and Bolshevism.’” Of Hitler's "Mein Kampf” and speeches Masaryk has said: “The ‘case’ of Hitler Is a German affair. I am convinced that the Germans will find the right solution for it,” He is urgent, man of peace as he is, that democracy should defend itself when it is attacked, must never capitulate: “Democracy must never be passive under a slap in the face. It must hit back. In critical times *it must fight. When it is attacked that does not mean that it is conquered, or will be.” For decades he was a professor of philosophy, but never an embodiment of the dry bones of learning. During his .Presidency he has accumulated a library of 90,000 volumes. When the w>ar broke out and he left Austria, to work abroad for the creation of his State, the Austrian authorities confiscated his whole small library with the rest of his possessions. In his four years as emigre he lived a disturbed and restless existence, never long in one place; he travelled half over the world for his cause; and everywhere however short his stay, there grew a small library In his study, so that in his travels he was accompanied by a growing collection of books. His greatest pleasure as President has been to be able to buy as many books as he needs. Ultimately his library is to become the property of his nation, and steps are already being taken for Its endowment. It is to occupy the ground floor of a great library building, to be called the T. G. Masaryk Institute, and to be associated with a research institution and with the Masaryk Museum.