e psychological moment to have arrived for measuring
swords with Russia. The murder served as an admirable pretext to veil
grossly aggressive tactics. It was hoped that Russia might be manoeuvred
into a position where autocracy would rather abandon the Slav cause than
seem to condone assassination; and it was confidently believed that Britain
would hold aloof from a quarrel whose origin was so questionable. Stripped
of all outward seeming, the true issues of the conflict were very
different. Just as the policy of violent Turkification adopted by the Young
Turks inevitably provoked the Balkan War, so the policy of Magyarisation,
which has dominated Hungarian affairs for forty-five years and poisoned the
relations of Austria-Hungary with her southern neighbours, has led directly
to the present conflagration.

Sec.9. _The Future of the Southern Slavs_.--There have always been two fatal
obstacles to an Austrian solution of the Southern Slav problem,--Magyar
hegemony and the Dual System, to which alone that hegemony owed its
survival; and it is these two worn-out and reactionary ideas (if they can
be described as "ideas") that are at present fighting their death-struggle.
It was the ambition of Francis Ferdinand to achieve Serbo-Croat unity
within the Monarchy, and thus simultaneously to counteract the attractions
of Pan-Serb propaganda and to remove the most fertile source of friction
between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. His death destroyed the last chance of
such a solution; for the statesmen of Vienna and Budapest were not merely
incapable but openly hostile. An appeal was to be made to the arbitrament
of the sword.

Long before war broke out it had become a commonplace of political theory
that the Southern Slav question could be solved in one of two ways--either
inside the Habsburg Monarchy or outside it--either with its help and under
its aegis, or against it and despite its resistance. With the outbreak of
war the problem assumed a new form; the alternatives are the absorption
of the two independent Serb States in the neighbouring Monarchy--in other
words, the union of the entire Southern Slav race under Habsburg rule--or
the liberation of her kinsmen in the Monarchy by Serbia as the Southern
Slav Piedmont. This latter ideal, it has always been obvious, could only be
achieved through the medium of a general European war, and it is in this
manner that it is actually in process of achievement.

The Austrian Note to Ser