In the fourth year of this terrible war, which has already cost the nations numberless sacrifices in blood and treasure, the first peace efforts have been inaugurated. We, the Czech members of the Austrian Reichsrat, which, through the verdicts of incompetent military tribunals, has been deprived of a number of its Slav Deputies and Czech Deputies to the dissolved and as yet unsummoned Diet of the Kingdom of Bohemia, and to the equally unsummoned Diets of Moravia and Silesia, recognize the declarations of the Czech Deputies in the Reichsrat, and deem it our duty emphatically to declare, in the name of the Czech Nation and of its oppressed and forcibly silenced Slovak branch of Hungary, our attitude toward the reconstruction of international relations. When the Czech Deputies of our regenerated nation expressed themselves during the Franco-Prussian war on the international European problems they solemnly declared in their memorandum of Dec. 8, 1870, that "all nations, great or small, have an equal right to self-determination, and their complete equality should always be respected. Only from the recognition of the equality of all nations and from mutual respect of the right of self-determination can come true equality and fraternity, a general peace and true humanity." [Illustration: SHADED AREA SHOWS THE PROJECTED STATE OF JUGOSLAVIA, INCLUDING SERBIA, MONTENEGRO, AND SLAVIC PORTIONS OF AUSTRIA-HUNGARY] We, the Deputies of the Czech Nation, true even today to these principles of our ancestors, have, therefore, greeted with joy the fact that all States based upon democratic principles, whether they are belligerent or neutral, now accept with us the right of nations to free self-determination as a guarantee of a general and lasting peace. Also the new Russia accepted the principle of self-determination of nations during its attempts for a general peace as a fundamental condition of peace. The nations were freely to determine their fate and decide whether they want to live in an independent State of their own or whether they choose to form one State in common with other nations. DEMANDS INDEPENDENCE