Page:The Czechoslovak Review, vol4, 1920.pdf/293

On April 14, 1920, the first National Assembly of the Czechoslovak Republic, after finishing its labors, adjourned sine die. In the midst of the tempestuous election campaign our outgoing revolutionary parliament did not receive that attention to which it was entitled. We live too near the events, therefore are unable to weigh properly or to differentiate its accomplishments from the ordinaries of daily life. This marks the end of the revolutionary period of Czechoslovakia, begun with the escape of Masaryk (from Bohemia) in December, 1914, and now begins the regular constitutional state life of the Czechoslovak Republic.

We do not know how future history will look upon the disbanded National Assembly, but this much we may expect, that two features will be pointed out the long session of the revolutionary assembly and the absence of representatives of the German people.

The revolutionary National Assembly sat from November 14, 1918 until April 4, 1920, or, exactly one year and five months. Rightfully, it was a continuation and an enlargement of the National Committee organized on June 13, 1918, through an understanding of the political parties, which undertook the first revolutionary government in Czechoslovakia on October 28, 1918. Its first composition plainly showed that the National Assembly should be but a provisional corporation which would frame a constitution for the Czechoslovak State, control the first government of the republic and then step aside at the earliest moment possible for a duly elected representative assembly. This did not happen; the National Assembly sat longer than anyone, in the beginning, would have dared to imagine. Future history will certainly indicate several reasons for this occurrence, causes internal and external.

The Peace Conference, in spite of all pressure, domestic and foreign, procrastinated and dragged. Nevertheless the primary questions of the Bohemian Germans and of Slovakia were definitely solved by it in favor of the Czechoslovak Republic at least in the eyes of Germans and Magyars. Similarly, the unsettled conditions of the Magyars will be pointed to, particularly the Bolshevik invasion into Slovakia in the summer of 1919, which also delayed arrangements of constitutional matters for the republic. We must remind ourselves that even domestic causes in the Fall of 1918 tended to prolong the sessions of the National Assembly. Our leading Czechoslovak statesmen overestimated the resistive possibilities of the Central Powers, beginning with the overthrow, which actually began in October 1918 and lasted until the Spring of 1919. As a result, an agreement on the future governmental constitution of Czechoslovakia was not reached, except understandings of fundamental principles. The duty of framing constitutional bills fell to the government of the republic, whose ministers, during the session of the National Assembly, had to run about to gather working material for the new constitution and to pass on legislative bills, which might have been prepared otherwise.

Because the revolutionary National Assembly approached its main task comparatively very late, on the eve of its existence, its character was changed. The first National Assembly did not become a constitutional convention, but it impressed upon itself, by reason of circumstances greater than itself, an imprint of a parliamentary sitting, but not of parliamentary sittings from the series of famous parliamentary epochs of liberalism, when the opposition parties engaged the government in daily debates sparkling with brilliancy and humor. Our first Czechoslovak parliament resembled, too much, the modern parliament, which gives all its work to committees and makes its formal sittings a mere voting machine. Probably in our National Assembly, the extraordinary mechanism of its formal sittings will contribute even that circumstance that it did not contain an actual serious opposition.

Possibly it would have been different, if the Germans had participated in the re-

*) Translated from “Our Era” (Naše Doba). This article shows the domestic feeling regarding the work of the first or Revolutionary National Assembly of the Czechoslovak Republic. (Ed.)