PALACKÝ AND CZECH POLITICS AFTER 1876
same time, he set a courageous and heartening example for his countrymen and demonstrated that they would refuse to settle for less than first-class citizenship within the Monarchy and the same rights and responsibilities enjoyed by the politically and economically more advanced countries of Western Europe and North America.12
From 1876 to 1914, Palacký exercised an indirect but profound influence upon Czech politics through the laws and self-governmental institutions that he and his National Party colleagues, F.L. Rieger, Karel Mattuš, and Jakub Škarda had helped establish during the early 1860’s. Subject to imperial supervision within the “two-tracked” Cisleithanian system of government, the Czechs used these institutions at the communal, district, and provincial levels to obtain a substantial degree of political autonomy. Like Palacký, most middle-class Czechs regarded these institutions as the first step toward the eventual achievement of Bohemian state-rights and the greater federalization and liberalization of the Habsburg Monarchy. This they did despite the fact that class voting in communes and districts and curial voting for the provincial diets insured that men of wealth and education would control all self-governmental institutions. In fact, Palacký did not challenge the view of his colleagues that such men ought to lead and speak for the entire nation. Also in the early sixties, he and his associates took the lead in organizing the National, or Old Czech Party and several of the more important Czech patriotic and cultural associations that, unlike the party, would continue to develop after 1914. At the same time, they established, as noted, the alliance between the National Party and the conservative great landowners that would endure, based as it was upon unrepresentative self-government in an authoritarian constitutional framework, until the collapse of the Monarchy.13
After 1876, Palacký’s political programs from the sixties appeared increasingly to be reactionary if not anachronistic, especially as articulated by the National Party. Unrepresentative self-governmental institutions primarily served an educated and propertied elite that ostensibly governed in the interests of the entire nation. So long as a majority of Czechs had no formal education or experience in self-government, Palacký himself had preferred rule by an elite to letting all citizens share equally in the management of public affairs. In contrast to the Young Czechs and ultimately all Czech parties but his own and the more conservative Catholics, he opposed establishing not only universal manhood suffrage but political parties in the modern sense of the word and any sort of multi-party system. Seldom did he show much concern for what became two pressing problems of later nineteenth century Czech politics-the social question and the emancipation
