“As for yourselves, gentlemen, it is not only your right, but your duty, to choose between the following alternatives:  either you trust me to proceed with the peace negotiations, and in that case you must help me, or you do not trust me, and in that case you must depose me.  I am confident that I have the support of the majority of the Hungarian delegation.  The Hungarian Committee has given me a vote of confidence.  If there is any doubt as to the same here, then the matter is clear enough.  The question of a vote of confidence must be brought up and put to the vote; if I then have the majority against me I shall at once take the consequences.  No one of those who are anxious to secure my removal will be more pleased than myself; indeed far less so.  Nothing induces me now to retain my office but the sense of duty, which constrains me to remain as long as I have the confidence of the Emperor and the majority of the delegations.  A soldier with any sense of decency does not desert.  But no Minister for Foreign Affairs could conduct negotiations of this importance unless he knows, and all the world as well, that he is endowed with the confidence of the majority among the constitutional representative bodies.  There can be no half measures here.  You have this confidence or you have not.  You must assist me or depose me; there is no other way.  I have no more to say.”

5

=Report of the Peace Negotiations at Brest-Litovsk=

The Austro-Hungarian Government entered upon the peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk with the object of arriving as quickly as possible at a peace compact which, if it did not, as we hoped, lead to a general peace, should at least secure order in the East.  The draft of a preliminary peace was sent to Brest containing the following points: 

1.  Cessation of hostilities; if general peace should not be concluded, then neither of the present contracting parties to afford any support to the enemies of the other.

2.  No surrender of territory; Poland, Lithuania and Courland retaining the right of determining their own destiny for the future.

3.  No indemnity for costs of war or damages due to military operations.

4.  Cessation of economic war and reparation of damages sustained by private persons through the economic war.

5.  Resumption of commercial intercourse and the same provisionally on the basis of the old commercial treaty and twenty years’ preference subject to restriction in respect of any Customs union with neighbouring countries.

6.  Mutual assistance in raw materials and industrial articles.

A further point was contemplated, dealing with the evacuation of the occupied areas, but the formulation of this had to be postponed until after consultation with the German Supreme Military Command, whose co-operation was here required owing to the mingling of German and Austro-Hungarian troops on the Russian front.  The Army Command has indicated a period of at least six months as necessary for the evacuation.