Benedict XV which was entrusted to the Papal Delegate. He approved of it and promised to lay it before the Pope. It demanded Czechoslovak independence, the liberation of the Historical Lands of the Bohemian Crown and of Slovakia. I myself attended the Catholic Congress in Washington on June 20, 1918, where I defined my religious standpoint and explained why I had become a decided opponent of the political Catholicism which had been fostered in Austria and Hungary under Hapsburg influence. I advocated the separation of Church from State on the American principle; and the American Catholics understood that to be independent of the State is by no means harmful to the Church. I promised to work for a peaceful separation; and, as regards Church lands, I repudiated confiscation. When the Executive Committee of the National Alliance of Czech Catholics in America resolved, on October 25, 1918, to send its representatives to the Czechoslovak Republic in order to enlighten the priesthood and the Catholics on the subject of separation, I welcomed the proposal in a letter dated November 15. I may add that on November 27 the “Association of Slovak Catholics” in America also recommended that the relations between Church and State should be settled in accordance with the principle of separation, due account being taken of conditions in Slovakia.
The other weighty consequence lay in the negotiations at Pittsburg between Czechs and Slovaks. There, on June 80, 1918, I signed the Convention (the “Czechoslovak Convention”—not Treaty) between the Slovaks and the Czechs of America. It was concluded in order to appease a small Slovak faction which was dreaming of God knows what sort of independence for Slovakia, since the ideas of some Russian Slavophils, and of Štúr[1] and Hurban-Vajanský,[2] had taken root even among the American Slovaks. Therefore Czechs and Slovaks agreed upon the Convention which demanded for Slovakia autonomous administration, a Diet and Courts of Law. I signed the Convention unhesitatingly as a local understanding between American Czechs and Slovaks upon the policy they were prepared to advocate. The other signatories were mainly American citizens, only two of them being non-Americans, though further signatures were afterwards added without
