THE CZECHS AND AUSTRIA
Governments of Budapest and Vienna and even by the Crown itself. The political amnesty of last July was a belated attempt to revive for the young Emperor the sympathies which his granduncle's reactionary policy had effectually destroyed among the Czechs. But so far from winning them to a more moderate attitude, it merely served as an encouragement to further efforts in the national cause; and though Dr. Kramař and the other pardoned deputies lost their seats in Parliament, they were received in veritable triumph on their return from prison, and have ever since directed the inner counsels of the Parliamentary Club. Since the restoration of Parliament the Czechs have acted in the very closest accord with the Southern Slavs and Ukrainians, whose claims to unity and independence are of a similar character to their own, and who are no less uncompromising opponents of the Dual System. Like them, they have steadily resisted the blandishments of the Government, which has made more than one overture for their political support.
Last November the Austrian Government, which throughout the summer had played with the idea of constitutional reform, definitely declared its intention to uphold not only the Dual System, but also the artificial boundaries between the seventeen provinces of Austria, without the abolition of which there can, of course, be no reconstruction on a racial basis. The Czechs, realising that nothing more was to be gained in Vienna, and indignant at the possibility of their being ignored as completely at the conclusion of peace as they had been at the declaration of war, resorted to a new expedient for forcing their national claims upon the attention of the world. On 6 January, 1918, a meeting was convoked at Prague, which might fairly claim to be regarded as a Constituent Assembly of the Czech nation. It was attended by all the Czech deputies in the Reichsrat and in the Diets of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, by Dr. Kramař and the other deprived deputies, and by a number of the most prominent figures in the literary and commercial life of Bohemia. The resolutions passed by this representative assembly have been suppressed in their entirety by the Austrian Censor, but they are known to have reaffirmed in a much more outspoken form the programme of Czecho-Slovak independence proclaimed on 30 May, and to have expressed open disapproval of the principles upon which Count Czernin was conducting the peace
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