PALACKÝ AND CZECH POLITICS AFTER 1876
he would not today be honored at home and abroad as the political and intellectual “father of his country.”16
Most Czechs have always recognized that Palacký and his colleagues, despite their opposition to universal suffrage and popular participation in politics, regarded the common people with affection and did not deliberately encourage their exploitation by an intellectual or commercial elite. Palacký, in fact, deeply revered if he did not idealize the common people, from whom he and most other Czech political and intellectual leaders had arisen. Moreover, his vision of future Czech politics did not in principle exclude greater popular participation. To be sure, he thought that only an educated and nationally conscious electorate could be trusted to vote responsible and intelligently. The number of citizens eligible for that sort of electorate, small during his lifetime, grew quite rapidly after the advent in 1869 of free, compulsory, and secular elementary education for all Czechs. Besides, some efforts to broaden popular political activity, including those undertaken after 1900 by T.G. Masaryk’s Progressive Party, even cited Palacký in advocating the simultaneous moral and intellectual education of a future mass electorate.17
Like almost all Czech political leaders of his and later generations, Palacký did not on principle advocate a policy either of compromise or of opposition toward the authoritarian Habsburg Monarchy. Czech politicians sought by legal and non-violent means to advance what they discerned to be the national interest. They chose to compromise or cooperate with the Habsburgs, if that appeared likely to bring satisfaction. If not, they usually undertook non-violent opposition to the imperial government, often by means of the press, self-governmental institutions, and popular demonstrations. In trying to realize his state-rights program, Palacký often encountered intransigeance on the part of the Habsburg dynasty and the privileged social strata that upheld it. He did not lose his confidence and sense of mission, despite the fact that he and the Czech cause suffered severe setbacks in 1849 and 1851, from 1862 through the later sixties, and again in 1871. Throughout, Palacký refused to compromise “Bohemian state-rights,” even to the extent of refusing to elect delegates to a central Reichsrat for Cisleithania or to participate in deliberations of the Bohemian diet so long as that situation obtained. Thus, the policy of the National or Old Czech Party was, in theory, more resolute in passively opposing the dynasty than any policy pursued by the politically more radical Young Czechs, who after establishing themselves as an independent political party in December, 1874, participated actively in the Bohemian diet. To be sure, Old Czechs as well as Young Czechs meanwhile continued
