All who will not admit the argument, I would refer to a fact which it would be difficult to evade.  Six months afterwards, when there was already clear evidence of the German collapse, when Andrassy declared a separate peace, the Germans, as a matter of fact, threw troops into the Tyrol.  If they, when utterly exhausted, defeated, and ruined, with revolution at their back, still held firmly to this decision and endeavoured to make a battlefield on Austrian territory, how much more would they have done that six months earlier, when they still stood full of proud defiance and their generals dreamed of victory and triumph?  What I, secondly, also would maintain is that the immediate consequence of a separate peace would have been the conversion of Austria-Hungary into a theatre of war.  The Tyrol, as well as Bohemia, would have become fields of battle.

If it be maintained now that the great exhaustion from the war that prevailed throughout the Monarchy before April, 1917, had caused the entire population of the former Monarchy to rally round the Minister who had concluded the separate peace, it is a conscious or unconscious untruth.  Certainly the Czechs were decidedly against Germany, and it would not have been reasons of political alliance that would have prevented them from agreeing.  But I would like to know what the Czech people would have said if Bohemia had been turned into a theatre of war and exposed to all the sufferings endured by this and all other peoples, and when to it had been added the devastation of the fatherland, for, let there be no doubt about it, the troops advancing with flying colours from Saxony would have made their way to Prague and penetrated even farther.  We had no military forces in Bohemia; we should not have been able to check the advance, and quicker than either we or the Entente could have sent troops worth mentioning to Bohemia, the Germans, drawing troops from their wellnigh inexhaustible reserves, would have marched either against us or against the Entente on our territory.  The German-Austrian public would not have been in agreement with such a Minister; the German Nationalists and the German bourgeoisie have no say in the matter.

On October 28 the German Nationalists published their own particular point of view in the following manner: 

“The members of the German Nationalist parties were highly indignant at the way in which Count Andrassy answered Wilson’s Note.  Count Andrassy came from Hungary, and neither came to any agreement with the Imperial German Government nor with the representatives of the Executive Committee before drawing up the Note.  Although the peace negotiations were most warmly welcomed and considered most necessary, still the one-sided action of Count Andrassy in dispatching the Note to Wilson without previous arrangement with the German Empire has roused the greatest indignation in the German parties.  A few days ago a delegation from the German Executive