"At this grave moment when the Hohenzollerns are offering peace in order to stop the victorious advance of the Allied armies and to prevent the dismemberment of Austria-Hungary and Turkey, and when the Habsburgs are promising the federalisation of the empire and autonomy to the dissatisfied nationalities committed to their rule, we, the Czecho-Slovak National Council, recognised by the Allied and American Governments as the Provisional Government of the Czecho-Slovak State and nation, in complete accord with the declaration of the Czech deputies in Prague on January 6, 1918, and realising that federalisation and, still more, autonomy mean nothing under a Habsburg dynasty, do hereby make and declare this our Declaration of Independence: "Because of our belief that no people should be forced to live under a sovereignty they do not recognise and because of our knowledge and firm conviction that our nation cannot freely develop in a Habsburg confederation which is only a new form of the denationalising oppression which we have suffered for the past three centuries, we consider freedom to be the first pre-requisite for federalisation and believe that the free nations of Central and Eastern Europe may easily federate should they find it necessary. "We make this declaration on the basis of our historic and natural right: we have been an independent state since the seventh century, and in 1526 as an independent state, consisting of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, we joined with Austria and Hungary in a defensive union against the Turkish danger. We have never voluntarily surrendered our rights as an independent state in this confederation. The Habsburgs broke their compact with our nation by illegally transgressing our rights and violating the constitution of our state, which they had pledged themselves to uphold, and we therefore refuse any longer to remain a part of Austria-Hungary in any form. "We claim the right of Bohemia to be reunited with her Slovak brethren of Slovakia, which once formed part of our national state, but later was torn from our national body and fifty years ago was incorporated in the Hungarian State of the Magyars, who by their unspeakable violence and ruthless oppression of their subject races have lost all moral and human right to rule anybody but themselves. "The world knows the history of our struggle against the Habsburg oppression, intensified and systematised by the Austro-Hungarian dualistic compromise of 1867. This dualism is only a shameless organisation of brute force and exploitation of the majority by the minority. It is a political conspiracy of the Germans and Magyars against our own as well as the other Slav and Latin nations of the monarchy.