MASARYK, THOMAS GARRIGUE first president of Czechoslovakia, was born on March 7, 185o, in the Moravian border-town Hodonin. His father was a coachman em ployed on one of the Austrian Imperial estates, a native of Kop zany in Slovakia (Slovakia then being a part of Hungary) his mother came from a semi-Germanized Czech family of Hustopa, in the Moravian plains. In his boyhood Masaryk was taught Czech and smattering of German, and was educated at a Czech school in Cejkovice. His parents sent him for two years to the lower German Realschule of Hustope6, with the intention of making him a teacher.
The object being abandoned, he became first a locksmith's apprentice in Vienna, then a blacksmith at CeR. In 1865 his former schoolmaster induced his parents to resume their first idea of making him a teacher, and in that year Masaryk passed the entrance examination to the second grade of the "gym nasium," and began studying at Brno. He supported himself, as did many poor students, by tutoring. He developed a rebellious disposition, disagreed with some of the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church and refused to go to confession. As a result he had to leave the gymnasium, and he continued his studies in Vienna, where he graduated first from the gymnasium with hon ours, then from the university, where in 1879 he became a lecturer in philosophy. He spent a year in Leipzig, where he met his future wife, Charlotte Garrigue, daughter of the president of the Germania Insurance Company of New York. In 1881 he published in German his first great sociological work, Suicide as a Phe nomenon of Modern Civilisation. In 1882, when the University of Prague was divided into two parts, the one Czech, the other German, he was appointed to one of the Czech professorships. In 1885 he published his larger work on Concrete Logic.
The Forged Mss. and "Realism."—In 1883 Masaryk founded a critical monthly review The Athenaeum, which soon sprang into prominence by becoming the battle ground on which the famous mss. of Krlaove Hradec and Zelena (Koeniginhof and Gruenberg) were attacked and proved to be forgeries, manufactured in the early 19th century by two well-meaning men, whose object was to provide texts to prove that in the Middle Ages there had been a high standard of literary culture in Bohemia. The authen
ticity of the mss. had before been doubted by Slav philologists, but it was not until 1886, when Masaryk invited the great Czech philologist Gebauer to analyse the mss. philologically, himself analysing them sociologically, that they were conclusively proved to be forgeries.
Masaryk's political career started in the early 'eighties. In 1887 his friends founded a fortnightly paper Cas ("Time"), which two years later he took over and transformed into a political weekly. At that time the so-called Old Czech (Conservative) party was losing ground, and Masaryk, invited by the Young Czech (Lib eral) party to be a candidate, was elected to parliament in 1891. He soon resigned his seat (1893) to devote himself to a crusade of moral education among the Czech people.
Although his opinions on nationalist questions were unpopular —an unpopularity which increased when in 1899 he fearlessly withstood a popular anti-Semitic superstition as manifested in the so-called "ritual murder trial" of a Jew named Hilsner—his ideas made a deep impression. They became the rallying cry of the younger generation not only of the Czechs, but of the Yugoslays and other Slays who flocked to Prague.