THE CZECH DECLARATION OF 6 JANUARY
especially those nations which still are suffering under foreign domination. That is why it is necessary that this right of free national development and to self-determination of nations, great or small, to whatever State they may belong, should become the foundation of future international right, a guarantee of peace, and of a friendly co-operation of nations, as well as a great ideal which will liberate humanity from the terrible horrors of a world war.
We, deputies of the Czech nation, declare that a peace which would not bring our nation full liberty, could not be and would not mean a peace to us, but only a beginning of a new, desperate, and continuous struggle for our political independence, in which our nation would strain to the utmost its material and moral forces. And in that uncompromising struggle it would never relax until its aim had been achieved. Our nation asks for independence on the ground of its historic rights, and is imbued with the fervent desire to contribute towards the new development of humanity on the basis of liberty and fraternity in a free competition with other free nations which our nation hopes to accomplish in a sovereign, equal, democratic and socially just State of its own, built upon the equality of all its citizens within the historic boundaries of the Bohemian lands and of Slovakia, guaranteeing full and equal national rights to all minorities.
Guided by these principles, we solemnly protest against the rejection of the right of self-determination at the peace negotiations, and demand that, in the sense of this right, all nations, including, therefore, also the Czecho-Slovaks, be guaranteed participation and full freedom of defending their rights at the Peace Conference.
The Finance of the Anatolian Railway
Sir William Ramsay, in a letter to us from Edinburgh, makes the following comment on Professor Holland Rose’s article, “The Encircling Myth once more” (The New Europe, No. 69):―
“On p. 107 Professor Holland Rose speaks about the Turkish railways in Asia Minor as ‘constructed mainly with German money.’ They were constructed almost entirely with French money, which was obtained through the Swiss banks, as the French Government did not allow direct dealings on the Bourse. This fact, I thought, was well known. It has often been published, and I have it on the authority of von Gwinner himself in the year 1910, when he was discussing the situation very openly, and stating his plans and views about the past and the present. I had come into relations with him, as I was writing a series of papers on the economic results attained by the German Anatolian Railway, and I wanted to get official statistics to bring out the facts. I went direct to von Gwinner in Berlin, and told him what I wished to do, and how I proposed to do it. It caused him a good deal of trouble to get statistics collected from different Turkish official documents, and he remarked that the plan which I was carrying out of arranging a series of statistics year by year, so that they told their own story without any comment, had not occurred to him, and seemed to him extremely useful. He declared that his desire was to get this money not only from France, but also from London.”
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