Political Leadership.—In 1900 his followers founded a polit ical party which was officially named the "Progressive party," but which continued popularly to be known as the Realist party. The programme was founded on the principles enunciated in Masaryk's books. As a candidate of the Realist party he was re elected to parliament in 1907. In parliament he soon began to criticize Austria's passive subjection to Germany and her own aggressive policy in the Balkans, especially as manifested in the annexation of Bosnia-Hercegovina. In the notorious "high treason" trial of Agram (19o9), by which the Austrian foreign minister, Count Aehrenthal, tried to justify his annexation policy, and in the Friedjung trial (19°9) which followed, Masaryk played a decisive part. He proved, on the basis of his private investiga tions, that the case for the Crown rested on documents forged at the Austro-Hungarian Legation in Belgrade. His fearless dis closures in the Austrian Reichsrat (May 1909) and in the Austro Hungarian delegations ( 19i o) forced the proceedings in the Agram trial to be quashed, compelled Friedjung to retract his accusations against the Serbs, and unmasked the methods of Austro-Hungarian diplomacy. Masaryk incurred the intense dis pleasure of the official and court circles in Vienna, but made a reputation abroad.
Propaganda.—During the World War he developed his case against Austria-Hungary in detail, and at the end, in his work, The New Europe, characterized it as a corrupt, imperialist, militarist, pretentious and senseless relic of the middle ages. When the war broke out he was still a member of the Austrian parliament. In Dec. 1914 he escaped from Austria, and in the following four years conducted a political and propagandist campaign in Swit zerland, France, England, Italy, Russia and the United States on behalf of Czechoslovak liberation from Habsburg rule. He founded the propagandist journals La Nation Tcheque, which was edited in Paris by Ernest Denis, and Ceskoslovenska Samostat nost (Czechoslovak Independence), which was produced in the small town of Annemasse in Savoy, and he was one of the original board of Dr. R. W. Seton-Watson's The New Europe, which was founded in London in 1916.
Masaryk's stand against Austria was publicly proclaimed in his Hus anniversary speech made in Geneva in July 1915, and re affirmed in his revolutionary manifesto, issued by him with the sanction of the Czech political leaders at home, on Nov. 14, 1915. The signatories of that manifesto, who included representatives of Czech residents in France, Great Britain, America and Russia, formed a central revolutionary committee called the Czechoslovak National Council, of which Masaryk acted as president and Benes as secretary. Finding his work in Switzerland hampered by enemy spies, he settled in London, where, at the invitation of Ronald Burrows, principal of King's college, he joined the staff of that college. Here he worked for two years combating, with the help of his friends, Wickham Steed and R. W. Seton-Watson, the German-Magyar propaganda, and familiarizing Western opinion with Czechoslovak aspirations.
The Russian revolution of 1917 enabled him to go to Russia. Several thousand Czech soldiers—prisoners of war—had gone over to the Russians, and wanted to organize themselves into active military units. After some difficulty Masaryk induced the revolutionary Russian Government to agree to the formation and equipment of an independent Czechoslovak army (92,000), whose exploits as they marched eastwards from Siberia to Vladivostok were one of the impressive later episodes of the war. He trans ferred some of them to the western front.
President.—He went to the United States in May 1918. The result was the Lansing declaration (May 29, 1918) of sympathy with the cause of Czechoslovak and Yugoslav independence.
The Allied Governments associated themselves with that decla ration on June 3, 1918. The ice being thus broken, the Allied Powers and America recognized Masaryk's national council as the de facto Government of the future Czechoslovak State. Masaryk was elected first president of the Czechoslovak republic on Nov. 14, 1918, and re-elected on May 27, 192o. He had been sentenced to death in contumaciam, and in 1923 occurred the death of his wife, largely the result of persecution to which the Government had subjected his family. He was re-elected president in May 1927, and again in May 1934 but in Dec. 1935 he resigned. For his work from 1918 onwards see CZECHOSLOVAKIA.
Masaryk ranks equally high as a philosopher and as a states man. His philosophical treatises were the result of his study of Czech history. His pronounced realism was a reaction both against the Teutonic idealism which developed moral speculation with out reference to the practical affairs of life and against the Tol stoyan Slav philosophy of non-resistance to evil. Masaryk, as philosopher, stood for a unified conception of life, in which the spiritual and religious took their place with the intellectual and the political as aspects of an integral whole. The following are the chief of his many philosophical, sociological and political works :-0 Hypnotismu, On Hypnotism (188o) ; Sebevraida, Sui cide and Modern Civilization (1881, also in German) ; Theorie Pravdepodobnosti a Humeova Skepse, the Theory of Probability and Hume's Scepticism (1882, Ger. trans. 1884) ; Blaise Pascal (1883) ; Theorie dezin dle zdsad T. H. Buckle, the Theory of His tory according to T. H. Buckle (1884) ; Zakladove Konkretin Logiky, Essay on Concrete Logic (1885, Ger. trans. 1886) ; Slav janofilism I. S. Kirejevskeho (1889) ; Ceskci Otdzka, the Czech Question (1895) ; Karel Havlicek (1896) ; Otdzka socidlni, filo soficke a socidlni zciklady marxismu, The Philosophical and Soci ological Foundation of Marxism (1898, also in German) ; Jan Hus Rusko a Evropa (1913, Eng. trans., The Spirit of Russia, 1919, etc.) ; The Problem of the Small Nations in the Eu ropean Crisis (1916) ; The New Europe (1918, French trans. 1918, Czech 1919, German 1922) ; Svetovd Revoluce (1925; German trans., 1927; Eng. trans., The Making of a State: Memories and Observations 1914-18, 1927 ; French trans., 193o). (G. G.)