Vienna after Wilson’s reply. Moreover, the former Austrian Minister, Dr. Joseph Redlich, shows that when the Austrian German parties formally established the new Austrian State on October 21, they went ahead of the other Austrian races in dismembering the Empire; and he admits that the Emperor’s manifesto of October 16 had given these races a legal basis for their action. The truth, on which it is necessary to insist, is that Vienna and Prague were pursuing divergent political aims.
The bonds that bound us to Austria were finally severed in the first sitting of our National Assembly on November 14. Dr. Kramář proclaimed the dethronement of the Emperor Charles and the establishment of our Republic. No vote was taken and, as the Statute Book shows, no law was passed. Acclamation was so spontaneous and unanimous that a formal vote seemed superfluous.
On November 4 the National Committee in Prague had been asked, on behalf of the Emperor Charles, to give him permission to settle at Brandeis on the Elbe. There was a disposition to grant the request on condition that he should abdicate and abandon all claims to the Bohemian Lands. In the Year Book of the National Assembly there is, to this effect, a brief note that aroused my curiosity, for it would surely have been a mistake thus to expose the ex-Emperor to temptation. It appears, however, that the note is incomplete and that no formal reply was made to him since the National Committee had been informally approached through third parties. An informal answer was therefore sent through the same channels. In much the same way the Magyars thought it expedient to approach the Slovaks, and the Hungarian Government went so far as to invite Dr. Milan Hodža, who had been a Slovak member of the Hungarian Parliament, to take part in negotiations at Budapest.
The Germans of Bohemia.
Another problem of a special kind was raised by the separatist tendencies of the Bohemian Germans. After the revolution in Prague, as I have said, they sought to organize four German districts—“German Bohemia,” “The Sudetenland,” “South German Moravia,” and “The Bohemian Forest Region.” But neither in political nor in administrative importance were these efforts comparable to our own revolution. Indeed, their rudimentary character seems to me a proof of the organic con-
