Page:The Bohemian Review, vol2, 1918.djvu/198



When the delegates of the thirteen colonies proclaimed in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, the independence of the United States, it was a matter of doubt, whether they would go down in history as fathers of a nation, or as unsuccessful rebels, or whether their act would at all be remembered. Because their people stood behind them and fought for seven years to make the Declaration of Independence good, the signers have been remembered and honored by five generations of men, and Independence Hall is the shrine of America and the birthplace of democracy.

In this sacred place, under the shadow of a great tradition as Professor Masaryk expressed it, there met the delegates of twelve European and Asiatic nations to proclaim to the world that they, too, are independent. The future only will show whether the declaration of October 26, 1918, will take its place in history as a document of equal, if not even greater im portance, than the declaration of July 4. At any rate a powerful impulse was given by the Philadelphia meeting to the idea of co-operation among the various peoples of that zone of small nations stretching be tween the Germans and the Russians, the importance of which has only recently been appreciated.

The convention was a real assembly of nations. There was a delegate from Finnland and there was one from Jerusalem. There were nations represented, the very name of which was unknown to 99 Americans out of a hundred, and it maybe said that the convention put one people on the map for the first time, namely the Uhro-Rusins. Some of the delegates represented a recognized government with full power to bind it, others spoke for the principal revolutionary organizations of their people, but lacked authority to conclude any thing binding on behalf of their organizations; while still other delegates represented only the principal national organizations of their people in the United States.

High above the delegates there towered both physically and intellectually the tall figure of Professor Masaryk. His position as president of htethe [sic] Czechoslovak government and as chairman of the convention signaled him out for the attention of the press and the people of Philadelphia, and every one who came in contact with Masaryk carried away the impression that he had spoken to one of the truly great men. Sitting in the chair in which George Washington presided over the Constitutional Convention, or in the high carved chair made of the wood of the tree under which William Penn concluded his famous treaty with the Indians. Masaryk was the personification of calmness, strength and intellect. Whenever he spoke, the pencils of the reporters got busy.

There were some able men among the delegates; the spokesman of the Jugoslav National Council, Hinko Hinkovich, is an extremely able and forceful lawyer from Zagreb (Agram). He was a very zealous advocate of the claims of the Jugoslavs to all the Adriatic coast of Austria, and if it had not been for the personal influence of the chairman, a quarrel might have broken out between the Jugoslavs and the Italians. Captain Stoica, representing the Roumanians of Austria-Hungary, attracted much attention by his modest bearing in spite of his noble war record. Dr. Szlupas of the Lithuanian National Council made a very striking appearance, when he presented the claims of his people to complete independence. The Uhro-Rusins, the smallest of the twelve nations, a veritable Benjamin among the tribes, had an able representative in a young Pittsburgh lawyer, Gregory I. Zsatkovich. The Czechoslovaks are particularly interested in this small people because the Uhro-Rusins are their neighbors on the East and because the Uhro-Rusinian people of this country whose number is one-half as large as that of their people in Hungary are debating now the problem, whether to join as an autonomous unit the Czechoslovak state ofor [sic] the future Ukrainian republic.

The convention furnished the best evidence of the tremendous impression which the Czechoslovak cause has made upon America in the last six months. In the Democratic Mid-European Union the Czechoslovaks are but one of twelve nations, but the newspapers of Philadelphia insisted upon speaking of the convention as the Czechoslovak Convention. In vain did the