to Congress upon the exceptions taken to his Fourteen Points, and to the War Aims Speech of Lloyd George, by the German Chancellor (Count Hertling) and the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister (Count Czernin); and had boiled down his programme to four principles. On September 27 he had enunciated five principles for the conclusion of peace and as many in regard to the organization of the League of Nations.
People in Vienna believed that Austria-Hungary could gain President Wilson’s goodwill by appearing submissive. They had failed to understand his curt rejection of their peace offer in September; and since America left the offer of October 5 so long unanswered, the greatest excitement prevailed in Vienna and in pro-Austrian circles generally. Enquiries into the reason for the delay were even made in Washington through indirect channels. When the answer came at last it was a surprise.
Simultaneously I heard that the Emperor Charles was preparing a manifesto in which he would promise to transform Austria—not Hungary—into a federal State. He was drowning man clutching at a straw. Nevertheless his idea was dangerous, and it was necessary to forestall the effect which the manifesto might have in quarters that still retained considerable sympathy with Austria. Therefore I issued at that moment the Declaration of Independence which I had long had in mind. Logically, the Declaration was a consequence of the establishment of our Provisional Government which had been notified to the Allies on October 14; and it was cast in a form calculated to remind the Americans of their own Declaration of Independence. It had also a tactical value; for by the time the Emperor Charles’s manifesto was published, the colours of the free Czechoslovak State were already flying from the house where I lived as President of our Provisional Government.
In the Declaration of Independence I rejected the Emperor Charles’s belated effort to transform Austria into a sham Federation, and outlined the fundamental principles on which the Provisional Government would build our new State. I submitted the first draft of it to a number of friends, among them Judge Brandeis and Mr. Ira Bennett, the Editor of the “Washington Post,” whose criticisms of substance and form were reviewed by a small committee which put the finishing legal and formal touches to it. Of this committee Mr. Calffee, the well-known legal authority, was a member. It was a good instance of harmonious cooperation and, at the same time,
