In Washington I heard something of Professor Herron’s reports. For me the important thing was that President Wilson sent on parts of them to Mr. Balfour; and that, later, with the assent of the President, Herron sent most of his documents direct to Mr. Balfour who communicated them to a small official circle. Not only did Professor Herron understand and appreciate the significance of our Legions, not only did he observe how, on this account, the Allied Governments recognized our National Council and gradually adopted our anti-Austrian programme, but he became convinced that our movement for freedom was genuine, and estimated accordingly the importance of our people’s task in the reconstruction of Europe and of Eastern Europe in particular. He saw how artificial and, indeed, impossible Austria-Hungary was, and he rightly discerned a specifically Hapsburg insincerity in what Dr. Lammasch, Dr. Hertz and others told him for the benefit of President Wilson. He understood that the Emperor Charles and his agents wished to use the President and America for their own ends.
For instance, Lammasch described the Emperor Charles to Herron, at the beginning of February 1918, as an opponent of Prussian and Magyar domination, and wished President Wilson to express satisfaction that Count Czernin’s speech of January 24 should have revealed Austrian readiness for a policy of reconciliation with the Hapsburg peoples. When this had been done, Lammasch suggested, the Emperor Charles would write to the Pope a letter, which would be published, promising to grant autonomy, in principle, to the Austrian races. These roundabout suggestions displeased Herron, who demanded that the Emperor himself should come forward honestly and take in hand the transformation of his Empire. Only on this condition could the President and America accept and support the plan.
The trick was transparent. The Emperor was to promise to the Pope, not to his own peoples, a system of autonomy, and was to do even that only “in principle.” His chief care was for his own prestige. President Wilson was to welcome Czernin’s speech in which, according to Lammasch, the Emperor himself felt his ideas had been inadequately expressed, though it was alleged to have been made at the Emperor’s direct wish. The same care for prestige came out again in the Emperor’s letter of February 17 to President Wilson, in which he asked the President to send a special personal envoy to him. As may be seen from the President’s negative answer
