The dynasty did, indeed, experience a deathbed repentance. In that black month of October, when he was daily throwing himself on President Wilson’s doorstep, pleading his zeal for peace and his love for the Fourteen Points, Kaiser Karl was also promising mountains and marvels to his own subjects--the complete transformation of the monarchy into a federation of national states. Such a system adopted even a few years earlier might have saved Austria; but, as some one has remarked, at the point at which matters had arrived, ‘one might as well have talked of federating the Kilkenny cats.’[54] As the Czecho-Slovak National Council declared, the Austrian races were no longer to be duped by promises from Vienna, as to the value of which they had had a sufficiently long experience. “What we demand the government at Vienna will never give us, and couldn’t, if it wanted to.”[55] In the course of thirty days the monarchy spontaneously split into fragments. Almost without opposition from the authorities, almost without a hand being raised in defence of the secular throne of the Hapsburgs, power passed to the National Councils improvised by the Czecho-Slovaks, the Yugo-Slavs, the Poles, the Ukrainians, the Roumanians, the Magyars, and even the German Austrians. November 12-13 the last of the Hapsburgs abdicated. It was a dissolution without a parallel, with the elemental force of a tidal wave. When the Peace Conference met at Paris, it did not have to concern itself with the old question whether the maintenance of Austria was a European necessity. The Austrian peoples themselves had settled that question, with irrefragable logic and unmistakable finality. The territories of the defunct empire had already been partitioned, in rough, provisional fashion and not without a few miniature wars, among eight states corresponding to the eight principal nationalities of that Empire. Five of these states were reckoned at Paris as Allies--Italy, Roumania, Yugo-Slavia, Czecho-Slovakia, and Poland; two of them--Hungary and German Austria--ranked as enemies; while as to the Galician Ukrainians, Paris could never quite make up its mind whether to count them as friends, enemies, or neutrals. The main problem before the Conference, therefore, was, while making peace with the two enemy states mentioned, to effect a definitive division of the Hapsburg inheritance that would be just, practical, and conducive to the peace and security of Europe.