only [their] own salvation, but also liberty, enlightenment and humanity in general.” The Slavs trusted that the European nations would recognize the justice of this new arrangement. But whatever the case, the Slavs were committed to defending their national well-being by all available means. The manifesto refuted the calumnious accusations which the enemies of Slavdom were spreading, especially the “bogey of political Pan-Slavism.”
Turning to specific injustices, the Slavs protested the unjust partition of the Polish state and called on the “governments concerned finally to remedy this old sin.“21 The manifesto also demanded that the Hungarian ministry cease persecuting the Slavs and fully assure their just national rights.
In conclusion, the Prague Slavs proposed that “a general European Congress of Nations be summoned for the discussion of all international questions”; prophetically, they urged that this step be taken at once, “Before the reactionary policy of the individual Courts causes the nations, incited by hatred and malice, mutually to destroy one another!”
Among students of the Slav Congress, the manifesto has evoked disparate judgments. Its admirers, exemplified by the Czech historian Josef Macůrek, maintain that the manifesto went well beyond other liberal homilies of the day by its radical egalitarian spirit and supranational appeal, and was “an effective reply to the Germans and Magyars who abused and sneered at the Congress.”22 Other writers have been more critical. The Bohemian German historian Anton Springer, who witnessed the events of 1848 in Prague, pointed to the political naivete and the contradictions of the document, such as the discrepancy between the radical urgency of the closing sentence and Palacký’s cautious approach to reform within Austria.23 Stanley Z. Pech has contrasted the idealistic depiction of a pacific Slav character, which contributed to the prevailing theme of Slav goodness and German evil that permeated the document, with the failure to weigh the social cause of oppression.24 Most recently, the Czech historian Arnošt Klíma has maintained that “in contrast to Palacký’s other writings of 1848, the manifesto was very general, insufficiently concrete,” and for this reason was largely ineffectual, which, Klíma added, likewise reflected the fate of the congress as a whole.25
Essentially the manifesto reflected a compromise of the views advanced during the congress. Although specific political proposals were confined to the Austrian Slavs, the manifesto nonetheless expressed concern for the Slavs beyond the Habsburg borders. But any reference to the Russians was deliberately sidestepped to avoid adding fuel to charges that the Slavs were playing into tsarist hands.26 Both the romantic theme of a common Slav
