Both the Southern Sla y s and Czechs immediately made constitutional declarations; the former demanded a national union of the Southern Slays, the latter a territorial union of the lands S.
During this long period he occupied himself with completing the constitutions by incorporating certain declarations, said to be Ignatian, which explained and sometimes completely altered the meaning of the original text.
This seems to be still the law, although a declaration was substituted for the oath by the Statutory Declarations Act 18 35, s.
Had he remained in office his declarations leave no doubt that he would have cultivated the British alliance and cooperated with Great Britain in Egypt; and when the Freycinet administration, which succeeded, shrank from that enterprise only to see it undertaken with signal success by England alone, Gambetta's foresight was quickly justified.
These declarations were obviously a concession to the widespread feeling, among civilized nations, that peace is an object in itself, an international political condition requiring its code of methods and laws just as much as the domestic political conditions of nations require their codes of methods and laws.