his indifferent French,
for fear, he said, lest the intrigues conducted by the Serbs or their
accomplices should precede him in capturing the President's
sympathies. "In spite of their perfidy," said he, "I was the first to
lend them a hand by being the first to declare war against Austria,
although I was certain that the provocation originated on their side
by the Sarajevo murders and their Black Hand.... Horrible thought that
this country refuses to realize the crime it has committed, for which
it is responsible to mankind no less than William!"

At last, on January 5, 1917, the _Neue Freie Presse_ acknowledged that
Austria provoked the war with the intention of crushing Serbia. It is
a formal and categorical confession. And it obliges us to consider
seriously the thesis put forward by Jules Chopin in _Le Complot de
Sarajevo_ (Paris, 1918), according to which the plot was hatched at
Konopi[vs]t[ve] between the German Kaiser and the man to whom the plot
proved fatal. Monsieur Chopin, after a minute examination of the facts
and of grave presumptions, believes that Serbia was to be held up to
the world as having provoked the war that was to consolidate the
Monarchy and satisfy the Archduke's paternal ambitions. The army
manoeuvres were to be in Bosnia, the Archduke was to make his
ceremonial entry into Sarajevo on Vidov dan, the day when the Serbs
solemnly celebrate the battle of Kossovo, and [vC]abrinovi['c], son of
the Sarajevo police-spy, was to be assisted through the Chinese Wall
which then encircled Bosnia. But what did not enter into the royal
calculations was the possibility that other Southern Slavs, acting on
their own initiative, might strike a real blow.

THE MISERABLE MACEDONIANS

This period of Yugoslav history (from 1876 until the European War) was
at the beginning much concerned with Macedonia. And so it was towards
the end. Very wretched was the lot of the Macedonian Slavs--occasionally
the Exarchists and occasionally the Patriarchists were in the
ascendant, but while in religious matters the Greeks clung by all
possible means to their ancient, privileged position, so the Turks
maintained in secular affairs the sorry plight of their Slav raia. The
Macedonian Slavs, when the rest of Europe began to listen to their
cries, were not the most sympathetic of mortals--the more enterprising
of them had abandoned the country, while the moral sense of those who
stayed was grievously affected by the course of