have to leave the management of their own political and military activities to the organizers who had just arrived from home, as only they would have real political prestige in the eyes of the Allied Governments. The colonists must limit themselves to activities of a local character concerning their internal organization.
We discussed these matters in the presence of Masaryk at Paris. We summoned also Dürich, Dr. Sychrava, and Plesinger-Božinov from Switzerland. It was finally agreed that in place of the “Czechoslovak Foreign Committee,” a body which was too closely dependent upon conditions among our colonists, a new central organization would be established with headquarters in Paris. Paris was chosen for fairly obvious reasons. The chief military front was in France; Paris was, to a considerable extent, the political, diplomatic, and military centre of all the Allied countries, and accordingly it was to be expected that the war would be decided, for us also, in France and not on the Eastern Front in Russia.
After long consideration the new body was given the name of “Conseil National des Pays Tchèques.” In this connection I may point out that Štefánik, himself a Slovak, advocated the term “des Pays Tchèques,” since in view of the complete ignorance of Slavonic affairs in Western Europe he did not wish to complicate our demands by introducing the Slovak question. The coherence and permanence of this body was a corrective to the circumstance that the chief members of the National Council were scattered and without a fixed domicile. A permanent General Secretariat was thus located in Paris, forming the headquarters of the whole movement. This secretariat, with permanent executive functions, was devised as a means of impressing the unified and substantial character of our whole movement upon the Allied Governments and their public opinion. It was also intended as a rallying-point for the whole of our activities, both as regards the Allies and also our troops and colonists in France, England, Russia, America, Italy, Serbia, and the neutral States.
By acting as an intermediary for news, by communicating instructions, and concentrating the whole of our movement in Paris, the National Council and its secretariat later became a real practical link between our colonists, between our prisoners of war, who afterwards became our fighting forces, and also between our leading political personalities. Although we at first had not
