have the "freest opportunity to autonomous development". In response, Emperor Karl I agreed to reconvene the Imperial Parliament in 1917 and allow the creation of a confederation with each national group exercising self-governance. However, the leaders of these national groups rejected the idea; they deeply distrusted Vienna and were now determined to get independence. On 14 October 1918, Foreign Minister Baron István Burián von Rajecz asked for an armistice based on the Fourteen Points. In an apparent attempt to demonstrate good faith, Emperor Karl issued a proclamation ("Imperial Manifesto of 16 October 1918") two days later which would have significantly altered the structure of the Austrian half of the monarchy. The Polish majority regions of Lesser Poland and part of Galicia were to be granted the option of seceding from the empire to join the earlier established Polish proto-state, in order to reunite with their ethnic brethren in the Polish lands held by Russia and Germany, with the ultimate goal of resurrecting the sovereign Polish statehood. In fact, the Regency Council in Warsaw already adopted on 6 October Wilson's proposals as the basis for creating a Polish state. However, the imperial government attempted to curb the Polish ambitions by inciting the Polish-Ukrainian conflict through separating and retaining the remainder of Galicia and the entire Lodomeria, designated in the secret Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (Ukraine–Central Powers) for the purpose of creating a Ukrainian polity, intended in the proclamation to constitute along the rest of Cisleithania a transformed federal union composed of four parts—German, Czech, South Slav and Ukrainian. Each of these was to be governed by a national council that would negotiate the future of the empire with Vienna. Trieste was to receive a special status. No such proclamation could be issued in Hungary, where Hungarian aristocrats still believed they could subdue other nationalities and maintain the "Holy Kingdom of St. Stephen". It was a dead letter. Four days later, on 18 October, United States Secretary of State Robert Lansing replied that the Allies were now committed to the causes of the Czechs, Slovaks and South Slavs. Therefore, Lansing said, autonomy for the nationalities – the tenth of the Fourteen Points – was no longer enough and Washington could not deal on the basis of the Fourteen Points anymore. In fact, a Czechoslovak provisional government had joined the Allies on 14 October. The South Slavs in both halves of the monarchy had