“With regard to the reply of the Entente States to President Wilson, in which it is declared that one of the war aims of the countries fighting against our Monarchy is ‘the liberation of the Czechs from foreign rule,’ the presidency of the Czech League repudiates this insinuation, which is based upon entirely false suppositions, and it emphatically proclaims that, as always in the past, so too at the present time and also in the future, the Czech nation envisages the conditions of its development only beneath the sceptre of the Habsburgs.”
The first news that we in Paris received of this was by way of Switzerland in a telegram emanating from German-Magyar propagandist sources, precisely at the moment when Sixtus of Bourbon was beginning his activities in Switzerland, and when the Austrophiles in France and England had started an agitation against the war aims formulated in the note to Wilson. As can be imagined, this produced a painful impression upon Masaryk and the rest of us. Hitherto we had acted in concert with the politicians at home, but now this course of action had been interrupted. From what we knew of the feeling among our people, we judged that they had succumbed to strong pressure on the part of the Government. That is how we explained this regrettable occurrence to official circles and the Press in Allied countries. Fresh news arriving from Prague partly reassured us. Before long we heard that Czech public opinion was extremely dissatisfied with the resolution of the League and the National Council, and that it had shown its disapproval in an unmistakable manner.
The change in the international situation which was brought about by the entry of America into the war and the Russian revolution, was evidently the cause of the very marked change of tactics in Vienna with regard to the Czechs during March and April 1917. Czernin was laboriously seeking methods for reaching negotiations with the Allies; the Russian revolution, just as in 1905, was producing a disruptive effect upon Austria-Hungary, and Milyukov’s proclamation on our behalf had evidently not failed to exert an influence upon Vienna. The Czechs at home, just like ourselves abroad, welcomed the revolution as a new political era for Russia, which would bring about an equally profound change in our own conditions. Under these circumstances, Clam-Martinitz could no longer reckon with the fulfilment of his anti-Czech schemes in Austria.
We, too, believed that these two great historical events would
