which was to have taken place in Paris on October 15 as a sequel to the Rome Congress of April 1918, was postponed at the request of the French Government. Dr. Beneš, who was to have taken part in the Paris Congress, reported to me at the time that, on October 5, the Allies received the request of the Central Powers to open negotiations for an Armistice, and that, on this account, the Allied Supreme Council had been convened in Paris. At this Council Lord Robert Cecil asked, on behalf of England, that the Congress of the Oppressed Peoples might be postponed so that it should not coincide with the meeting of the Council. Apparently the Allies did not know what questions would come before the Council or what the result of the Congress would be. But it cannot be taken amiss that they should not have wished their proceedings to be troubled by external pressure.
Even had the support we received from the Allies abroad only been given as a tactical move with the object of hastening the capitulation of Austria and an anti-German peace, we should certainly not have been left in the lurch, for it was our policy and our Legions that had brought Austria to the plight in which the Allies wished to see her. We should not have gone empty-handed. The Allies would have been bound by their recognition of us. The German Chancellor’s “Scrap of Paper could not have had its counterpart in Paris. Of that we had taken good care.
Intentions.
In the last resort, judgment on historical events and on individual acts and deeds depends upon the intentions, the plans, the convictions and the motives of the persons, parties and peoples by whom history is made. It is not enough merely to register outward facts and details and to say, while looking with satisfaction on the result: “We have our Republic. Why worry about the manner and the hour of its birth?”
For my part I have described fully the plans, aims and motives of our work abroad, and I hope that a similar account may be given of the revolutionary movement at home. If our political maturity and our national character are to be rightly judged it is very important to establish—in relation to the collapse of Austria and to the revolution wrought in the world—exactly what was done at home during the war years, what happened at Prague on October 28, 1918, what were the purpose and the sense of our own revolution and what
