PALACKÝ AT THE SLAV CONGRESS OF 1848
is creating new worlds: freedom of speech, freedom of action have at last become realities.”18 The Slavs, “among whom liberty was ever cherished,” were determined not to embark on the course of oppression which had marred the history of the Latin and Germanic peoples:
[The Slav] demands neither conquest nor dominion, but he asks for liberty for himself and for all others: he demands that liberty shall be unconditionally recognised as the most sacred right that man possessed. Therefore we Slavs reject and hold in abhorrence all dominion based on main force and evasion of the law; we reject all privileges and prerogatives as well as all political differentiation of classes; we demand unconditional equality before the law, an equal measure of rights and duties for all.
The manifesto then raised an even more vital concern: the desire for the free development of Slav nationality: “Not less sacred to us than man in the enjoyment of his natural rights is the nation, with its sum total of spiritual needs and interests. Even if history has attributed a more complex human development to certain nations than to others, it has none the less always been seen that the capacity of those other nations for development is in no way limited.”
The manifesto denounced those nations which, in pursuit of their own aims, infringed on the just rights of other peoples to nationhood:
Thus the German threatens many a Slavonic people with violence if it will not agree to assist in the upbuilding of the political greatness of Germany, and thus the Magyar is not ashamed to arrogate to himself exclusive national rights in Hungary. We Slavs utterly decry all such pretensions, and we reject them the more emphatically the more they are wrongfully disguised in the garb of freedom.19
The Slavs did not seek vengeance for these wrongs; they were prepared to “extend a brotherly hand to all neighbouring nations who are prepared to recognise and effectively champion with us the full equality of all nations, irrespective of their political power or size.”
As for Austria’s political future, the Slavs were determined that “the state must be fundamentally reconstructed, if not within new [geographical] boundaries, at least upon new principles.” Foremost among these was the transformation of the imperial state into a “confederation of nations, all enjoying equal rights.”20 In this new union the Slavs envisaged “not
