circumstance as the necessary condition of the creation of a State. And though, as I have said, I hold that our State exists de jure since October 15, 1918, I decide de facto for the date of October 28 on the grounds just given. The question has its practical as well as its theoretical side, for it might affect the beginning of our obligation to pay reparations. Though not a political institution, the Reparations Commission decided, on April 15, 1921, that Czechoslovakia became a co-belligerent through the revolution of October 28, 1918.
Juridically, these questions have not yet been thoroughly studied. In studying them constitutionally and politically lawyers will find many an interesting and surprising problem, in our case as well as in those of other States which arose after the war. Precise juridical formulation of the actual conditions was not immediately feasible; and critics will discover more than one gap in the negotiations for the Armistice and the Peace Treaties. As in all revolutions, we have as yet no exact account of what happened. Events followed so swiftly one upon another and were in themselves so indefinite that it is no easy matter to describe them with scientific precision.
The Revolution at Home.
Yet, for present purposes, it suffices to take the official documents and the public statements of the revolutionary leaders. During the night between October 27 and 28 special editions of the Prague newspapers announced that the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister, Count Andrássy, had accepted President Wilson’s peace conditions. Dr. Rašín and Dr. Soukup declared this acceptance to be “the dying words of Austria-Hungary and the end of the Hapsburg Monarchy”; and on the same day, Dr. Rašín’s manifesto appealed to the nation “not to dash the hopes of the civilized world which, with blessings on its lips, remembers thy glorious history culminating in the immortal deeds of the Czechoslovak Legions in Siberia and in the West. . . . Keep thy escutcheon bright as thy national army has kept it. . . . Belie not the faith of our liberators, Masaryk and Wilson, that they have won freedom for a people fit to govern itself. . . .”
Thus Dr. Rašín repeated what our representatives had declared in Vienna on October 2, when Staněk, the Chairman of the Czech Association, had made a speech recognizing the National Council abroad and our Legions in the name of all Czech members of Parliament. He said to the Austrians, “You
