Adriatic, any heightening and intensifying of
the national consciousness of its people involved some danger to the
Dual Monarchy. For besides the Germans who control Austria, and the
Hungarians who control Hungary, the Austro-Hungarian Empire embraces
many millions of Slavs, and the South Slavs are of the same family
and speak practically the same language as the inhabitants of the
Kingdom of Servia. And Austria and Hungary can not get to their
outlets on the Adriatic--Trieste and Fiume--without passing through
territory inhabited by these South Slavs.

If, therefore, Austria and Hungary were not to be left land-locked
they must at all hazards prevent the absorption of their South Slav
subjects by the Kingdom of Servia. Pan-Serbism at once menaced the
integrity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and jeopardized its
position on the Adriatic. Hence the cardinal features in the Balkan
policy of Austria-Hungary were a ruthless repression of national
aspiration among its South Slav subjects--the inhabitants of
Croatia, Dalmatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina; a watchful and jealous
opposition to any increase of the territory or resources of the
Kingdom of Servia; and a stern and unalterable determination to
prevent Servian expansion to the Adriatic.

The new Servia which emerged from the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 was
an object of anxiety and even of alarm to the statesmen of Vienna
and Buda-Pesth. The racial and national aspirations already astir
among the South Slavs of the Dual Monarchy were quickened and
intensified by the great victories won by their Servian brethren
over both Turks and Bulgarians and by the spectacle of the
territorial aggrandizement which accrued from those victories to the
independent Kingdom of Servia. Might not this Greater Servia prove a
magnet to draw the kindred Slavs of Bosnia, Herzegovina, Dalmatia,
and Croatia away from their allegiance to an alien empire? The
diplomacy of Vienna had indeed succeeded in excluding Servia from
the Adriatic but it had neither prevented its territorial
aggrandizement nor blocked its access to the Aegean.

Access to the Aegean was not, however, as serious a matter as access
to the Adriatic. Yet the expansion of Servia to the south over the
Macedonian territory she had wrested from Turkey, as legalized in
the Treaty of Bukarest, nullified the Austro-Hungarian dream of
expansion through Novi Bazar and Macedonia to the Aegean and the
development from Saloniki as a base of a