The Czechoslovak Review/Volume 2/The Constituent Assembly of Prague
The Bohemian Review | ||
Jaroslav F. Smetanka, Editor, 2324 South Central Park Avenue, Chicago. | ||
| Vol. II, No. 3. | MARCH, 1918 | 10 cents a Copy |
The Constituent Assembly of Prague.
At the very time, when the plenipotentiaries of Germany and Austria at Brest Litovsk expressed their wholehearted endorsement of the principle of self-determination of nations, as applied to Russia, the elected representatives of the Czech nation assembled in Prague, one of the great cities of the Dual Monarchy, and applying the principle at home, declared that a nation of ten million which had been the chief source of strength of the Hapsburg realm, renounced allegiance to the Hapsburgs.
January 6, 1918, marks the culmination, up to this moment at any rate, of the revolt of Bohemia against German rule. On that day over 200 representatives of the Czech people met in Prague, the ancient capital of their race. All the Czech deputies elected by universal manhood suffrage to the Vienna parliament, all the living members of the last Diets of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, including one woman member who had been duly elected, but never allowed to take her seat, made up this assembly which was fully entitled to speak for the Bohemian people. The session was opened by Deputy Staněk, chairman of the United Czech Deputies’ Club; the entire proceedings lasted only one hour. The gathering declared itself to be a Constituent Assembly and as such adopted a declaration, the text of which unfortunately is not yet known in America, as the Austrian Government took the most severe measures not merely to confiscate, but to suppress it altogether. But Premier Seydler himself gave out what was startling in the declaration. He stated in the Reichsrat that in the Declaration of Prague one cannot find the slightest trace of any connection between Bohemia and the Hapsburg dynasty or the Austrian Empire. In fact Seydler said, according to the Vienna papers, that the Bohemian chiefs must now be looked upon as enemies of the State and be treated as such.
That the elected leaders of the Czechoslovak people should finally throw aside all ambiguity and burn their bridges behind them will surprise no one who has followed with sympathy and understanding the part played by Bohemia in the Great War. The Czechs have not been trimmers. They have not hesitated between the Teutons and the Allies; they have not threatened rebellion for the purpose of gaining concessions from their rulers; they did not back down, when repression was applied to their people with the famous German thoroughness and brutality, neither could they be bought by the emperor’s amnesty. And at the very time, when their tyrants seemed stronger than ever, when Austria drove out the invader both in the East and the South, when even the enemies of Austria flattered her and courted her, the Bohemian deputies defied their masters by declaring it to be the will of their people to have their own, completely independent Czechoslovak Republic.
The rage of the Germans of Austria, the fury of the emperor whose advances had been scorned, whose amnesty failed to win for him the condemned leaders, foretell another period of repressive measures. Von Seydler announced that the government would fight with all the means at their disposal the tendencies expressed in the Prague Declaration. What was even more striking and unusual was his statement that he had behind him in all this the highest factor in the State, the one who made the ministries come and go, the emperor himself. The easy-going Charles will not let the richest part of his inherited estate be lost to him without an effort to retain it by hangings and dragonnades.
It is a matter of regret that the text of the declaration has not yet been smuggled out of Austria. But the speech of Deputy Staněk who opened the convention has been published in the “Národní Listy”. In seven different places the censor cut out objectionable passages. But what remains gives some indication of the defiant attitude assumed by the convention. We quote a few of the significant passages from Staněk's speech:
"It has fallen to me to welcome you to this memorable gathering as the legitimate and freely chosen delegates of our entire nation. I welcome all my colleagues of the Imperial Parliament, and especially those who after a painful absence of many, many months are now taking for the first time a part in this plenary assembly and whose mandates conferred by the free choice of the people could not, in the eyes of the people, be taken away from them by commanded judgments of illegal courts. I welcome also the deputies of all three Diets of the lands of the Bohemian Crown, for neither dissolution nor expiration of the diets can deprive them of the right to speak in these fateful days of their nation. . . .
“It is our duty to declare to the nation and to the world that in our opinion one of the foundation stones of the future general peace must be the great idea of the self-determination of nations. And we can state with much satisfaction that our predecessors, delegates of the Czech people in 1870. in their protest against the proposed annexation of Alsace-Lorraine declared the right of free determination of nations to be the foundation of freedom and brotherhood, of general peace and true humanity, in these words: ‘All nations, great and small, have equal right to rule themselves and to have their individuality safeguarded.’
“When we see today that the right of self-determination is demanded by peoples of Europe who are not independent and never have possessed political unity, how much more strongly and firmly shall we insist upon it, we, the Czech nation, who have earned a secure place in history and who are second to no other nation in popular enlightenment, but who were robbed of our political independence.. . . .
“If there is then no hope that this right of self-determination may be had within Austria, there is even less reason to believe that there could be any guarantee of it in the Hungarian half of the empire. To speak of Hungary is to utter an accusation before the whole world. Hungary of today is the last survival of barbaric Asia in Europe. There is not in the world a more violent racial tyranny or more brutal political oppression than in that satrapy of the corrupt high-born Magyar oligarchy. A constitutional solution of the question of the self-determination of nations in Hungary would be a bloody perversion of the principles of justice, freedom and humanity before the face of the whole world. To leave the carrying out of this principle to the Hungarian parliament, which looks upon the rights of non-Magyar nationalities as nonexistent, would be burying it completely.
“Therefore the present situation is an impossible and intolerable one for us and we must declare with the greatest emphasis that in this way no permanent peace can be obtained. In this conviction we are at one with all the real democracies of the world (confiscated).
“Gentlemen of the Convention: Our Bohemian nation demands for herself nothing more but what every cultured and enlightened nation of the world demands and with her blood defends. Our demands are union with our Slovak brothers and independent political, economic and cultural life (confiscated). What is not deemed a crime, when others do it, shall not be a crime in our case. And if others who are sacrificing their lives and treasures for the freedom of their people get respect and recognition and appreciation, respect is due also to the men of our nation who, sacrificing all, follow after the same high ideal.”
After the declaration had been unanimously adopted, Chairman Staněk added these words: “In 1848, at the first memorable Slav Congress in Prague, our great Paul Joseph Šafařík said: ‘Dear brothers, there is no liberation from slavery except by fight; for us there shall be either victory, or noble death and immortal glory.’ With these words let us depart and scatter through all the Czechoslovak lands to take up the work for a new future of our nation.”
This work was published before January 1, 1929 and is anonymous or pseudonymous due to unknown authorship. It is in the public domain in the United States as well as countries and areas where the copyright terms of anonymous or pseudonymous works are 95 years or less since publication.
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