phrase by another statement, "We existed before Austria, and shall exist after her."
This period of the Czech policy was the last attempt at reconciliation between the Czechs and the Crown. Once again the Habsburgs had betrayed them, and sacrificed them without sample to the Germans, and to their own selfish dynastic plans.
Seeing that for the present it was impossible to constitute a Greater Germany placed under their hegemony, the Habsburgs retired from the scene and prepared for a new struggle. After vain attempts to establish a constitution, they resorted again to absolutism, a rule which lasted till 1860, and the proceedings so dear to the two Ferdinands of the seventeenth century were once again used in the struggle against the Czechs. Military disasters at last obliged Francis Joseph arbitrarily to decree a constitution to his people In 1860 he promised in the October Diploma to establish a constitutional rule, based on federalist principles. The Czechs, forced to renounce all hope of the reconstitution of the Czech countries in the form of an independent State, joined to the other Austrian provinces only by the person of the Emperor, demanded as a minimum programme a constitution in which the different provinces of the Empire, and particularly the Bohemian lands, would enjoy a large measure of autonomy. In a
