were formed in the administrative districts of Bohemia, while at Brno, or Brünn, and throughout Moravia, the Moravian members of the National Committee kept step with Prague and were in constant telephonic communication with the capital. Practically and theoretically some weight attaches also to the question whether the sovereignty of the Czechoslovak State prevailed throughout Slovakia from October 28 onwards. On this point there have been, I know, differences of opinion between various Departments of State, and the Supreme Administrative Tribunal has had to deal with them.
The Question of the Republic.
The question whether our State should be a Republic or a Monarchy is in itself important. Before the war our constitutional programme was monarchical. If individuals in other parties be left out of account, only the Social Democrats were, as a party, Republican; but even their republicanism was more theoretical than practical. There was no real, direct republican propaganda. I was republican in principle when I went abroad in December 1914, but the issue did not then seem to me urgent; and, in the very last resort, if Russia had not collapsed, I should have been prepared to support the election of some foreign dynasty, though not the Russian if it had been possible to avoid it. Hence the importance of ascertaining how and when, abroad and at home, the republican form was chosen, for the question of form is independent of the question of the State itself. The first Statute of October 28 leaves the form in suspense.
Abroad, as I have said, I reported to the Allies that the majority of our people were monarchists. This was in 1914 and 1915. But, in my memorandum to the French Government and to the Allies in February 1916, I declared officially in favour of a Republic. Consequently we proclaimed the Republic, finally and solemnly, in the Washington Declaration of Independence, and this Declaration was accepted at Geneva and in Prague.
Among us, as elsewhere, the Russian Revolution had turned feeling decisively towards a Republic. The first demand for it was openly put forward in the meetings of workmen which the Czech Socialist Council organized at Prague and in a number of provincial towns and villages on October 14, 1918; and though Dr. Rašín states in his “Maffia” that Austrian military dispositions prevented this from being done in Prague itself,
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