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when the Hohenzollerns are offering peace in order to stop the victorious advance of the Allied armies and to prevent the dismemberment of Austria-Hungary and Turkey, and when the Hapsburgs are promising the federalization of the empire and autonomy to the dissatisfied nationalities committed to their rule, we, the Czechoslovak National Council, recognized by the Allied and American Governments as the Provisional Government of the Czechoslovak State and Nation, in complete accord with the Declaration of the Czech Deputies made in Prague on January 6, 1918, and realizing that federalization, and, still more, autonomy mean nothing under a Hapsburg dynasty, do hereby make and declare this our Declaration of Independence.

We do this because of our belief that no people should be forced to live under a sovereignty which they do not recognize, and because of our knowledge and firm conviction that our nation cannot freely develop in a Hapsburg mock-federation, which is only a new form of the denationalizing oppression under which we have suffered for the past three hundred years. We consider freedom to be the first