press and reviews have readily published our articles and took generally a favourable attitude towards our movement.
The foremost object of our propaganda was, of course, to convince the Allied public of the necessity of the break-up of Austria, if Pan-Germanism was to be beaten and a permanent peace assured. The objections raised againt the dismemberment of Austria were either based upon malice and prejudice or upon misconception and ignorance. Strangely enough among the politicians who have shown greater solicitude for the reactionary Austrian Empire than for the freedom of the Slavs were such eminent Liberal and Socialist »authorities«, like Mr. Brailstord and Mr. Noel Buxton, M. P. and their organs the »Herald« and the »Nation«. The arguments used by our opponents were such as could have been manufactured by the Vienna Foreign Office itself: We were described as moonstruck idealists, whose aims were impossible to achieve. The dismemberment of Austria was described as an imperialistic object, even after the collapse of Russia. We were warned that the Allies did not enter the war to liberate us, that it would require thousands of lives on the part of England, and that if the Allies proclaimed the dismemberment of Austria as their object it would prolong the war indefinitely. Furthermore, they expressed doubts as to the real desires of the Czecho-Slovaks at home, and pointed out that the war might be shortened, if the Allies approached Austria with a view of concluding separate peace with her. They alleged that the new Austrian Emperor was anti-German, willing to grant his Slav subjects autonomy and to introduce a new spirit into the policy of Austria. This delusion about the possibility of detaching Austria and of winning the Habsburgs over was so strong in England that even some serious journals, like the »Times« and the Westminster Gazette« at one time worked under it, while the official circles themselves, although at all times true to the proclaimed principles of self-determination of nations, began to hesitate as to the advisibility of insisting in public upon the dismemberment of Austria, and to contemplate the possibility of a new policy with a view of detaching Austria-Hungary from the Central European Alliance.
From the very beginning we fought such prejudice and misconception as existed against us openly and always with the same arguments. We revealed the crimes committed by Austria and Hungary against their own subject Slavs, before and during the war, and we pointed out the fact that Austria was nothing but a tool of Germany, whose aim it was to dominate, with Austria’s aid, throughout Central Europe and the Near East. The only way to defeat this plan was to dismember Austria and liberate the Slavs and Latins. It was this international aspect of our question as the crucial
