SALUTE TO BENES
FORTUNE has smiled rarely on Czechoslovakia through these tense days, but it was a happy chance for the Republic's President that on the day of his broadcast to his countrymen Field-Marshal Goering should have chosen to address the Nan Party at Nuremberg. The opposing evangels have been stated, and the world may judge. It has its choice between the swashbuckler and the statesman—and from the point of view of pure entertainment the swash- buckler makes the better reading. "Ridiculous dwarfs of Prague "—from the same mint, obviously, as coined the "contemptible little army" phrase—serves well enough to tickle the ears of the empty-headed. And it undeniably has point. If waist-measurement is the criterion of greatness Dr. Benes, who hardly exceeds the Goebbels standard in girth or stature, must yield the palm and quit the field. Yet suppose it were true that "the mind's the standard of the man ? " In that field comparison would be cruelty.
The speeches of last Saturday have this in common, that each was characteristic of its author. That in itself is sufficient reason for making no further reference to one of them ; and reason no less sufficient for dwelling on the other. Every sentence of Dr. Benes' wise, moderate, courageous and con- ciliatory appeal to all sections of his people expressed the qualities that have marked him since those early days when the notable triumvirate of which he was one, and Masaryk and Stefanik the others, brought the Czechoslovak State to birth in the midst of war. He cannot claim, and never would, the title of pater patriae ; that belongs of uncontested right to one man alone, Thomas Garrigue Masaryk; but the founder's mantle has been laid on shoulders for which it was inevitably destined. Masaryk's desire and the people's will were one. If there could be no other than Masaryk as first President of the Republic there could as certainly be no other than Benes as second.
Benes today bears a weight of responsibility such as never fell on Masaryk. His country is under hourly menace of invasion by a Power containing five times the population of his own—and of his own something like a fifth might make common cause with the invader. Meanwhile that fifth 'is daily flouting his Government's authority and fomenting disorders calculated to give colourable excuse for intervention. Through all that negotiations vital to the future of the State, negotiations so delicate that a step too few may mean their breakdown and a step too many the sacrifice of the sovereignty by which the State exists, have to be carried through under the muzzle of foreign guns and in face of protests, intelligible and natural, from the Czechs who form the backbone of the State,' that-too much for equity and too much for safety has already been given away. • Those are the problems that every day confront the Presi- dent as he settles to his desk in that wide room in the Hradschin Castle, with its windows looking out on the cathedral of St. Vitus and down on the towered city and the statued bridges far below. He does not face them unsupported. He has his Cabinet and he has his Generals. But much of the burden he must necessarily bear alone. Of the three founders of the Czechoslovak State only he survives. No one else has played the part assigned to him through its twenty years of life, as Foreign Minister and then as President. On no one would national disaster fall with more crushing weight.
If disaster is averted it will be thanks to Benes first and foremost. He has laboured ceaselessly to weld the diverse races of his country into one, and if he had been left, with collaborator 4 like the Prime Minister, Dr. Hodza, and others, to carry through the work, he would have carried it to the point when only a handful of ,discordant irreconcilables remained. Authoritarian methods might have been for the moment more effective. The very freedom which Czecho- slovakia grants to all minorities—of speech, of writing, or voting, of religion, of demonstration—makes for disorder if disorderly elements so decide. But if Czechoslovakia were an authoritarian State its President would not be Eduard Benes. For him democracy is not a convention to be assumed or abandoned as expediency dictates. Democracy is part of the fibre and essence of his being. His ideal was not a Czechoslovak State alone, but a State where government of the people by the people for the people should be established and endure.
It was no plausible advocacy of his country's case that Benes laid before the world on Saturday. He was not, for that matter, talking to the world, but direct to his own people. He had to persuade them to accept in the interests of internal peace an agreement that comes near conferring on the Sudeten Germans the right to create a State within the State. He had to cool tempers down when other orators elsewhere grew hoarse inflaming them. But if Benes was not speaking to the world he was speaking in language which half the world, that half where justice and liberty and respect for human personality prevail, understood as if it were its own. These were no doctrines staged for the occasion. They are the gospel Benes has been preaching year after year in the ears of all the nations at Geneva. Co-operation, construction, conciliation —those have been his aims, for the States of Europe and for the peoples within his own State framework. Ten years and more ago when Britain and France were pulling different ways, his ceaseless warning was that if peace in Europe was to be preserved they must pull together. Never, either, has his policy been anti-German. In every Czechoslovak plan for economic co-operation in the Danube basin it has always been recognised that Germany was an essential partner. And he is as much and as little a Bolshevik as Lord Baldwin.
That the Sudeten Germans had certain grievances Benes has never attempted to deny. If he had been a dictator he would have. remedied them sooner—except that if he had been a dictator he would probably not have remedied them at all. Now the danger is of the remedy being administered too fast. Hardest of all for Benes is the knowledge that he is waging an unreal fight. He has before him the claims of the Sudetendeutsch. They are urging their own case ; the British and French Governments are urging him to go to the limit of concession ; Lord Runciman is pressing him back and back while the Sudetens move no single inch. And all the time he knows the issue is not the future of the Sudeten- deutsch at all ; it is a far larger and more fundamental issue, in which they are no more than pawns. While he is striving ceaselessly for peace, forces beside which Czechoslovakia unassisted must be helpless are resolved there shall be no peace except on whatever terms they themselves dictate. And those terms would make Germany the arbiter of Czecho- slovakia's fate.
The President in his castle over Prague, wrestling with a problem that could be solved tomorrow if Herr Henlein would contribute a tenth of what Benes has to its solution, is in some respects the loneliest man in Europe—as lonely as Washington and Lincoln sometimes were. Hitler may seem a solitary figure, too, but loneliness is a different thing when you have the big battalions with you. What battalions Benes can count on will be known only when the moment of ultimate crisis comes. Meanwhile if by the extent of his concessions to the Sudetendeutsch he has tried his people hard, he has served them better than they know. For he has convinced a world, whose convictions may yet be the deciding factor, of the justice of their cause. Steadfastness and the resolute refusal to despair still command respect and admira- tion. A salute to Benes is a salute to gallantry and statesman- ship, to liberal thought expressing itself in liberal acts.
11. W. H.
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