dary, even after her great victories of the Balkan War.

The heir to the Hapsburgs--the man who, seeing the great age of his
uncle, might at any moment ascend the throne--was the Archduke
Francis. He had for years pursued one consistent policy for the
aggrandizement of his House, which policy was the pitting of the
Catholic Slavs against the Orthodox Slavs, thereby rendering himself
in person particularly odious to the Orthodox Serbs, so many of whose
compatriots and co-religionists were autocratically governed against
their will in the newly annexed provinces.

To the capital of these provinces, Sarajevo, he proceeded in state in
the latter part of last June, and there, through the emissaries of
certain secret societies (themselves Austrian subjects, but certainly
connected with the population of independent Servia, and, as some
claimed, not unconnected with the Servian Government itself), he was
assassinated upon Saturday, the 28th of June, 1914.

For exactly a month, the consequences of this event--the provocation
which it implied to Austria, the opportunity which it gave the
Hapsburgs for a new and more formidable expression of Germanic power
against the Slavs--were kept wholly underground. _That is the most
remarkable of all the preliminaries to the war._ There was a month of
silence after so enormous a moment. Why? In order to give Germany and
Austria a start in the conflict already long designed. Military
measures were being taken secretly, stores of ammunition overhauled,
and all done that should be necessary for a war which was premeditated
in Berlin, half-feared, half-desired in Vienna, and dated for the end
of July--after the harvest.

The Government of Berlin was, during the whole of this period,
actively engaged in forcing Austria forward in a path to which she was
not unwilling; and, at last, upon the 23rd of July, Europe was amazed
to read a note sent by the Imperial Governor at Vienna to the Royal
Government in the Servian capital of Belgrade, which note was of a
kind altogether unknown hitherto in the relations between Christian
States. This note demanded not only the suppression of patriotic, and
therefore anti-Austrian, societies in Servia (the assassins of the
Crown Prince had been, as I have said, not Servian but Austrian
subjects), but the public humiliation of the Servian Government by an
apology, and even an issue of the order of the day to the Servian
Army, so recently victorious, abasing th