Page:The New Europe - Volume 3.djvu/446

 besides party wishes and tendencies, that there are also laws. But that was a great mistake. He fell because he had some feeling for constitutional procedure. He had to give place to a man who has done nothing except to be a count; and that after all is in Austria quite a different factor from an ordinary Premier. So Count Clam-Martinic came, and his first act was to promise octrois [a coup d’état by arbitrary decree]. He certainly would have kept his word if the Russian Revolution had not suddenly interfered. It is an unhealthy state in which foreign influences are decisive in regulating important questions.

“The speech from the Throne also comes from the bureaucratic ink pot, not from the red blood of reality. It tries to meet with words the spirit which is forming a new world out of blood and iron. It is the Premier’s task to cover the Crown, not to expose it [to criticism], not to hide his own political and ethical weakness behind the Crown. We are convinced that the day will soon come, when no one on earth will be able to intervene between our nation and our king. The future is still obscure, but the world is seriously engaged in making the interests of the rulers fit with those of the peoples: and in future Crowns will rest upon the peoples In the speech from the Throne can be read the involuniary confession, that not only our constitution, but the whole Dual System has been declared bankrupt How the constitution is to be liquidated the Government itself does not know. Half-words are used because they are working with half-ideas. I will not enquire how far in this period of Poland’s political renaissance the idea of giving Galicia a separate position (Sonderstellung) corresponds with the principle of self-determination of peoples. But if Count Clam thinks that we [i.e., the Czechs] will ever attend a Reichsrat in which the Poles no longer attend in their present numbers, then he is hugely mistaken. We shall not submit to this attempted outrage. Such a thing would mean the dissolution of this Parliament. The Czechs also wish to determine the form of their political life. They want in future to make their own laws and govern themselves. They want the seat of the whole administration to be on the historic ground of their own fatherland, and it is their will that they should communicate with each other in all instances in their own language. Hence they demand the restoration of political independence (Selbständigkeit) and of the sovereign constitutional law of the Bohemian nation on the historic territory of the Bohemian Crown. In this new order of things the kindred Slovak branch of our nation, which lies on the frontier of our historic fatherland, ought also to be considered on the basis of natural right. We of course demand this, subject to the condition that not our eager wish and our interests, but the free decision and self-determination of the 3,000,000 Slovaks should decide in this question. The realisation of Bohemian constitutional law should take effect, subject to a guarantee of the national liberty and autonomy of the Germans in our fatherland. Their autonomy and national honour should remain unimpaired and free from danger for all time. Our aim, then, is to transform the Habsburg Monarchy into a community of free and equal States, which would exercise a natural force of attraction both upon the Balkan Slavs