o know the Slavonic South are well aware that Bosnia,
Dalmatia, and Croatia are a seething pot which needs no stirring from the
outside, and that the assassins are but the natural successors of the wild
young students who during the last five years fired upon the Governors
of Croatia and Bosnia.[1] But quite apart from this, the complicity of
official Belgrade is rendered incredible by urgent considerations of
internal Serbian politics. After a long and delicate negotiation the
Concordat with the Vatican had just been concluded: the Orient railway
question had reached the critical stage: above all, a customs and military
union between Serbia and Montenegro was on the point of being concluded.
But, of course, quite apart from such considerations, Serbia was suffering
from the extreme exhaustion consequent upon waging two wars within a year,
and her statesmen, despite the rebuffs administered by Count Berchtold,
were genuinely anxious for a _modus vivendi_ with the neighbouring
Monarchy, as an essential condition to a period of quiet internal
consolidation. But this was the very thing which the controllers of
Austrian foreign policy--the phantom Minister Berchtold, the sinister
clique in the Foreign Office, and the Magyar oligarchy, led by that
masterful reactionary, Count Tisza, the Hungarian Premier--were anxious to
avoid. They had never reconciled themselves to the new situation in the
Balkans; and having twice backed the wrong horse (Turkey in the first
war, Bulgaria in the second) still continued to plot against the Bucarest
settlement of August 1913. Salonica still remained the secret Austrian
objective, and Serbia the main obstacle to the realisation of this dream.
Not for the first time, the interests of Vienna and Constantinople
coincided, and the occult interests which link Budapest with Salonica
played their part in the game.

[Footnote 1: June 1910, June and November 1912, June 1913.]

The crime of Sarajevo removed the chief restraining force in the councils
of the Monarchy and placed the fate of Europe at the mercy of a group of
gamblers in Vienna, Budapest, and Berlin. The military party, under Konrad
von Hoetzendorf, chief of the Austrian General Staff (who a year ago was
seriously speculating as to the collapse of Austria-Hungary), joined hands
with the Magyar extremists, whose political monopoly was threatened by the
advancing Slavonic tide, and with the inner ring of Prussian diplomacy,
which believed th