Page:The New Europe - Volume 3.djvu/370

 of opposition or national revolution on the part of such a party are not merely laughable humbug, but gross insults to anyone who really thinks and works for this country. To the Party of Work’s declaration of war against progress the only answer can be a solid block of the productive bourgeois and working classes, on behalf of the Magyar legal state (jogállam) and Magyar culture.”

The meeting of the Austrian Reichsrat on 30 May, after being suspended for over three years, was made the occasion for declarations of policy by all the leading racial groups in the House. All the groups—and especially the Jugoslavs—were aware that the conditions of the moment made it impossible for them openly to claim union with their brethren outside the Monarchy (e.g. with Serbia); hence the deliberate, but very perfunctory references to the Habsburg dynasty. We supply the full text of these declarations to show the difficulties which confront racial reconciliation in Austria-Hungary under its present constitution.

(1) Mr. Stanek, speaking in the name of the Czech League (in other words, of all the Czech parties in the Reichsrat, including the Social Democrats), read the following pronouncement: “The representatives of the Czech people from all three provinces of the Crown of St. Wenceslas, on entering the Reichsrat at a moment of world-historic importance in the war, in which the movement for removing the rule of one people over another has become generally accepted, make the following declaration:—

“The delegation of the Czech people is profoundly convinced that the present Dualistic form (of government) has, to the obvious injury of the general interest, created ruling and oppressed peoples, and that, with a view to removing every national privilege (Vorrecht) and ensuring the unhampered development of every people, it has become absolutely necessary in the interest of the Empire as a whole and of the dynasty to transform the Habsburg-Lorraine Monarchy into a federal State of free and equal national States. While taking our stand at this historic moment on the natural right of peoples to self-determination and free development—a right which, in our case, is further strengthened by inalienable historic rights, fully sanctioned by the State—we shall, at the head of our people, work for the union of all branches of the Czecho-Slovak people in a single democratic State, not neglecting that branch of the race which lives adjoining to the historic frontiers of our Bohemian Fatherland.”

(2) Mr. Korošec, in the name of the newly-formed Southern Slav Parliamentary Club (consisting of the Slovene, Croat and Serb deputies in Austria) read the following statement: “The undersigned deputies, united in the Southern Slav Club, declare that they will demand, on the basis of the national principle and of Croatian constitutional law, the union of all territories of the Monarchy inhabited