were to be beguiled into negotiations; and in the case of the Emperor Charles personal inclination appears to have re-inforced a very excusable alarm for his throne. But the assurances given to the German party leaders last April as the result of a crisis within the Cabinet made it abundantly clear that Clam-Martinic would not go too far in a Slav direction; and the announcement, in the Speech from the Throne, of the postponement of the oath to the Constitution, left the door open for a constitutional coup d’état by Imperial decree—the so-called Octroi or Oktroyierung demanded by the German extremists. The Premier’s statement of policy, when at last it came, was an unmistakable declaration in favour of Centralism, and was accepted as such by the House. It made the support of three out of the four Slav groups (Czechs, Jugoslavs and Ruthenes) definitely impossible, and when the Poles declared against him his fate was sealed.
The recent debates in the Reichsrat have afforded the first opportunity for three years of publicly airing acute grievances, and therefore deserve very careful study, even in the somewhat bowdlerised form in which the President of the House, as self-constituted censor, allows them to reach the press. The speeches of some of the Slav deputies throw startling light upon the condition of Austria during the war, and we make no apology for printing large extracts.
Dr. Stransky (Young Czech).
Dr. Stransky [one of the leading Young Czech deputies in Moravia, and of Jewish origin] paid a high tribute to Dr. Kramař [who was condemned to death for high treason last year], and to the other Czech leaders now in prison. He characterised Kramař’s sentence by a “soi-disant court” as “a crass breach of the constitution and one of the most flagrant political crimes of the whole war.” “Their crime lay not in treason to Austria, but in loyalty to their nation and fatherland. . . . Our efforts [to obtain an amnesty] failed owing to the stupidity (stumpfer Sinn) of the Premier, who has no feeling for the needs and life of the people, but only a heart for the bureaucracy. It was intended not to sentence Kramař and his friends, but to bring the whole policy of the Czech people to trial. The Czechs have only appeared in Parliament with feelings of the deepest bitterness. Hardly had the war begun, when both the military tribunals and the political authorities flung themselves not upon the enemy of the frontier, but upon the hinterland. Fathers were torn from their families, wives from their husbands, young immature students were thrown into prison (Hartl, Pangerman: “Because you led them astray!”). No! It was you who cried “Los von Rom” (away from Rome), but you meant Los von Oesterreich (away from Austria).
“We, too, have suffered greatly in freedom and property, our sons and brothers, too, bled on the battlefield, only with this difference, that gentlemen on the Left [i.e., the Pangermans] were rewarded for what their sons or brothers did, while we have been ill-treated in an almost incredible manner by the authorities and the soldatesca.
“The working out of a constitution for Bohemia was entrusted to a man who does not know the Austrian people. Count Stürgkh certainly merely played with this question. . . . His successor, [Dr. von Koerber] remembered that in Austria there is really something
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