I found in London my dear old friends, the trio Mr. Wickham Steed, Madame Rose and Dr. Seton-Watson. They were the friendly refuge and the centre from which my political circle was daily enlarged. Steed had helped me in Vienna during the contest with Aehrenthal and in the Pashitch-Berchtold episode; Seton-Watson’s interest in Slovakia had brought me near to him. All three knew Austria-Hungary and the whole of Central Europe. This made me feel all the more at home with them. Round Steed gathered not only the English political world but the French and, in fact, the whole of Allied and neutral Europe—men of manifold interests and spheres of activity, soldiers, bankers, journalists, Members of Parliament, diplomatists, in short the active political world. I remember also meeting at his house the author of the “Life of St. Francis of Assisi,” Professor Paul Sabatier, and many others. Steed and Seton-Watson rendered great service to the cause of our liberation, not so much because I was able through them to set forth our aims in the papers controlled by Lord Northcliffe or because the influence of these two friends gave me access to the most influential quarters in London, but especially because both Steed and Seton-Watson fought for our aims and, as British political men and writers, made the anti-Austrian policy their own.
Soon after I reached London, and almost simultaneously with my inaugural lecture at King’s College, Steed published in the “Edinburgh Review” for October 1915 a programme in which he postulated a radical transformation of Austria-Hungary as the condition of a lasting peace, and called for the unification of the Southern Slavs and for a “United Czech-Moravian-Slovak” State. While I was in Paris for a time in 1916, he published a “Programme for Peace” in the same review (April 1916). In it he foreshadowed a United States of Yugoslavia, an autonomous Poland under Russian suzerainty, an independent or, at least, an autonomous Bohemia with Moravia and Slovakia, and a united Roumania. On account of the military situation he framed the demand for our independence with a certain reserve; later on, the reserve disappeared. Dr. Seton-Watson did his part in defining our aims and spreading knowledge of them through his excellent weekly review “The New Europe” of which the influence was very considerable. It may, I think, be gauged by the fact that adversaries moved heaven and earth to get him conscripted into the Army Medical Service—since he was not fit for the fighting ranks. In this they succeeded, until he was
