This issue of The. Spectator, I understand, contains an article
on ex-President Masaryk by a writer perhaps better qualified than any other in this country to appraise him. Little, obviously, remains for me, who met Dr. Masaryk only once, to add. Yet the death of one of the greatest men this generation has seen cannot be allowed to pass here without a word. Of the new States that the War brought to birth none started its career under guidance comparable to Masaryk's. His best-known book was called The Making of a State. It might as well, or better, have been The Maker, for his personality dominated every other in Czechoslovakia. Yet Masaryk would have been the first to insist that he could never have carried his task through without collaborators like Stefanik and Benes. Stefanik was killed just when his country needed him most, but Masaryk and Benes formed one of those almost preordained partnerships of which Washington and Hamilton, Botha and Smuts, are among the more obvious examples. That anyone except Dr. Benes should have succeeded his leader as President was hardly conceivable. If the choice had fallen elsewhere the blow to Masaryk would have been as great as if it had been deliberately directed against himself.
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