became a Westerner, like Masaryk, as against those in his own nation who were "Easterners" or Pan-Slavists. He became a believer in the West, in France, in the fact that Western Europe and America, not Russia, represented progress. He became filled with the idea that his own nation must learn from the West and not from the East; that like the West it must depend on realism—it must know how to do things, it must learn to observe, to analyze, to contemplate, sanely. It must not remain romantic as the other Slavs.[1]
After receiving his degree in law at Dijon in 1908, Edward Beneš returned to Prague, where the next year he took the degree of doctor of philosophy. He became thereafter a professor of political economy in the Prague Czechoslovak Academy of Business (about the equivalent of a junior college). Continuing his post-graduate studies in the social sciences, especially in sociology, he became in 1912 instructor in sociology at the University of Prague and a year later likewise at the Prague Polytechnic.
During the five years preceding the war Dr. Beneš was deeply immersed in scientific and publicistic writings, apart from which he called no attention to himself.[2] But it was only a few days after the World War broke out that he presented himself at Professor Masaryk's house in Prague with a complete plan for a Czechoslovak policy during the war. It called for a revolution. It called for assistance from France and from the West. It expressed his firm conviction that help to the Czechoslovaks would come from out of the West and not from Russia.
His writings down to the Great War had been premised[3] with the idea that Austria-Hungary could not be broken up, that the forces which held it together from within were
- ↑ Reichmann, Beneš, 15.
- ↑ Ibid., 14, 21–35. He was a prolific writer. His doctor's thesis was: Le Problème Autrichien et la Question Tchèque. Paris, 1908. He wrote, among others, a history of the labor movement in Austria and among the Czechs (1909–1910); Political Parties (Prague, 1912); Détruisez l'Autriche-Hongrie (1916); and Bohemia's Case for Independence. He was editor of La Nation Tchèque (1917–1918).
- ↑ See especially Beneš, Le Problème Autrichien, etc., p. 307.
