had been defending a certain Jew named Hillsner against a charge of "ritual murder." Masaryk believed that Hillsner was probably innocent of any such absurd and abominable crime. Believing so, he said so. But his students were many of them convinced of Hillsner's guilt. They and a great multitude of the people of Prague were resentful of Jewish activity and hostile to Jewish success, and ready to lay hold of any weapon of gossip and suspicion for discrediting the Jews and for overcoming them. So in all Prague there was a great passing anger against Masaryk, and in his lecture-room there was something of a tumult.

Then it was that Masaryk turned to the blackboard and wrote certain words upon it, silently, and let them stand there speaking for him, and turned back to his audience and opened his notes and went on, without further comment, to deliver his stated lecture on applied philosophy. The words were:

"Do not drink. Do not play cards. Work. That is the only way to meet competition, Jewish or any other."

Masaryk himself has always lived up to the rather exacting level of that writing on that blackboard. In fact his austerity, if he were not so unobstrusive about it in daily life, might be heavy to bear for those about him. Drinking, smoking, card-playing, anything that

savors of the lures of the flesh, seem to be quite outside his interest. Yet he is indeed altogether gracious about it. He sits amiable and kindly in the midst of men who are offering themselves up as sacrifices to alcohol and nicotine; and it seems to be only at rare intervals (as during the Hillsner incident) that it even occurs to him to suggest to other people that they should be Puritans.

Accordingly, in coming to know him, one does not see for quite a while that he is himself a Puritan and more than a Puritan in self-denial. One does not know that one has met an ascetic. One sees only a very dear and very charming old gentleman smiling oddly with the smile of a boy from the height of his age and authority.

Thus he appeared to the Czecho-Slovaks assembled in arms near Kief in 1917 and in the early months of 1918. And the question was: War or Peace? Germany was certainly triumphant on the eastern front now. No Russian army was left. And how could fifty thousand Czecho-Slovaks resist further? And an emissary came from Vienna and approached the Czecho-Slovaks and said:

"Make peace, and come back to Bohemia, and you will be amnestied and forgiven, and we will grant Bohemia an autonomous government.'

But Masaryk said to the Czecho-Slovaks:

That

"At one place in the world it is still possible to die with many comrades fighting Germans. place is France. Turn your faces eastward. Cross Siberia. Cross Russia. I will try to have ships for you at Vladivostok. And on the western front, if the Allies perish, you perish. But if the Allies win, then you will have the only Bohemia ever truly Bohemia -a Bohemia not 'autonomous' under the Hapsburgs, but wholly independent with a Government all its own."

So for the second time, when diplomacy might have bargained, Masaryk's diplomacy stood fast for a single, simple principle and made a straight, complete choice between right and wrong, and stood to get everything or nothing.

THE MARCH OF THE CZECHO-SLOVAKS It was everything. The Czecho-Slovak army did what Professor Masaryk told it to do. It marched. On that night Masaryk's aids saw something happen to him that they did not thing possible. They saw him cry. Bohemia was prostrate and in torture at home. And Bohemia's army was at Valley Forgeat a Valley Forge in a foreign, strange land. But it marched. And it took Siberia. And it was recognized by all the Allies and by the United States. And Bohemia became a belligerent, a recognized belliger

ent, on the side of the Allies and of the United States, with an army and with a Government. And Masaryk became President. And the two decisions which made him President and which made his nation again a nation were those two acts of faith at Paris and at Kief in the light of the spirit and in a great blackness of all physical fortune.

For those two acts his whole previous life was preparation.

In his youth he had known his own drift toward public affairs. He decided that he would become a diplomat. He was a student then at the University of Vienna. He was in his twenties. And there was a school at Vienna for the study of Oriental languages. To that school went young men who were getting ready for a diplomatic career in the countries of the East. And it gave certain courses even for outsiders. Masaryk, as an outsider, took a course in Arabic. And then he tried to be allowed to take all the courses. But there was a difficulty.

In Bohemia, and particularly in the Moravian part of Bohemia, there are great estates. These estates are owned for the most part by Germans who took them by force from Bohemian noblemen centuries ago. On them to-day live great families with such names as Lichtenstein and Loewenstein and Thun-Hohenstein and Schwarzenberg. And many of these estates

are owned directly by the Hapsburgs. They are imperial estates. They are the pleasure-grounds of the foreign German emperors of Vienna, rulers and chief robbers of Bohemia. And on such an estate Masaryk was born.

He is a Slovak. The Slovaks, by circumstances of Austrian and Hungarian politics, have been kept at a lower level of education and of property than the Czechs. Masaryk's father was a Slovak workman, working on the land of the Emperor Francis Joseph; and to that land, from time to time, to hunt and to be merry, the emperor would come with princes and archdukes and counts.

Now it was for such persons and for their relatives and for their friends that the School of Oriental Languages at Vienna existed. It was for them that all courses were open and a diplomatic career possible. But not for Masaryk. He could not be admitted. •

Thereupon he went back to his determination to be a scholar. In his boyhood he had enjoyed two years in a village school. Afterward, having worked for a locksmith and then for a blacksmith, he had become a pupil-teacher in another school near by. By tutoring duller or younger boys he went along through his lower studies and came to his upper studies and to the university. And he grew into being a teacher,