The War and Democracy Part 9

Orthodox 660,000 2,987,163 856,158 Calvinist } 589,000 2,621,329 ..

Lutheran } 1,340,143 ..

Mohammedan .. .. 626,649 Jewish 1,314,000 932,458 ..

Minor Sects 56,000 91,748 ..

Total population 28,324,940 20,886,487 1,898,044

--4. _The Genesis of the Southern Slavs._--The foregoing survey of tendencies in Austria-Hungary is utterly incomplete and inadequate, but it may perhaps serve as a basis for further study. Let us now consider her rival in the dispute which has led to the great war--Serbia.

Here, at the outset, it cannot be emphasised too strongly that those who regard the problem merely as a dispute between the government of Vienna and the government of Belgrade have not grasped even its elements. The Southern Slav question goes far deeper and wider than that; it must be treated as a whole, and of it Serbia is only a part. In any study of the Slavonic races the first fact which emerges is that they fall naturally into two main groups--the northern and the southern--divided by a solid wedge of three non-Slavonic races, the German, the Magyar, and the Roumanian, stretching from the Kiel Ca.n.a.l to the Black Sea. It is with the southern group that we are concerned.

The Southern Slavs fall into four sections--the Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, and Bulgars, who between them occupy the whole country from southern Carinthia to central Thrace. The significance of the Bulgars will be dealt with elsewhere, and of the Slovenes it will suffice for our present purpose to say that they are a small and ancient race, of vigorous stock and clerical leanings, whose true importance lies in their geographical position and its latent possibilities for the future. The Croats and Serbs occupy the border-line between West and East, between Rome and Byzantium, between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Broadly speaking, every Croat is a Catholic, every Serb an Orthodox. Broadly speaking again, the Croat language is Serb written with Latin characters, the Serb language Croat written in the Cyrilline alphabet.

Despite their common language, the two kindred races have never all been united under a single ruler. From the ninth to the end of the eleventh century the Duchy, then Kingdom, of Croatia was governed by native princes, upon whose extinction it was conquered by Hungary. For eight centuries Croatia has enjoyed an autonomous position under the Holy Crown of St.

Stephen; its scope has varied according to the political constellation, but till 1912 its constant tradition had remained unbroken. Meanwhile the Dalmatian coast towns remained a bone of contention between Venice and Hungary; but the marble Lions on their battered walls are still the best proof of the triumph of Italian culture within them. Ragusa alone resisted both Venetians and Turks, and preserved herself inviolate as the home of commerce and the muses, until her tiny Republic was destroyed by Napoleon in 1808. The Kingdom of Serbia developed on more distinctively Slavonic lines. During its great days in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries under the Nemanja dynasty it dominated the Balkan Peninsula, produced a code of law which is unique in mediaeval records, developed a prosperous commerce and mining industries, and seemed on the point of striking a new note in architecture. Her greatest Tsar, Stephen Dushan, died mysteriously of poison, when his hosts were already thundering at the gates of Constantinople (1356). But the greatness of his empire did not survive him, and only a generation later Serbian independence received its death-blow on the fatal field of Kosovo--the Flodden of the Balkans, but an event far direr in its consequences than Flodden was to Scotland. Bosnia and a fragment of Serbia lingered on under more or less independent rulers till the middle of the fifteenth century. Then the Turkish night replaced the Turkish twilight. From 1463 to 1804 the national life of the Serbs lay utterly crushed. In Serbia their n.o.bility was literally wiped out, in Bosnia it accepted Islam in order to save its lands. The relations of conqueror and conquered are best characterised by the single fact that a Christian who failed to dismount from his horse on meeting a Turk was liable to be killed on the spot.

Throughout this period of utter gloom only two things served to keep alive the Serb tradition--their splendid popular ballads, unequalled in Europe for directness and imagination, save, perhaps, by the ballads of the Anglo-Scottish Border; and the clergy of the Orthodox Church, poor ignorant despised peasants like their flock, yet bravely keeping the national flame burning. The one bright spot was the tiny mountain eyrie of Montenegro, which stubbornly maintained its freedom under a long succession of warrior-priests.

The Serb Patriarchate, which had long had its seat in Ipek, migrated to Austria in 1690, at the special invitation of the Emperor Leopold I., and has ever since been established (though the t.i.tle of patriarch lapsed for a time) at Karlowitz on the Danube. Large settlements of refugee Serbs from Turkey followed their spiritual chief to Croatia, Slavonia and the southern plains of Hungary between 1690 and 1740. The special privileges granted to them by the emperor were, however, gradually undermined and revoked by the Hungarian Estates. Meanwhile the "Military Frontiers" were extended on essentially democratic lines: a land-tenure subject to military service bred a hereditary race of soldiers and officers devoted to the Imperial idea, and it has taken many long long years of bungling on the part of Viennese and Magyar diplomacy to efface that devotion.

Thus the Habsburg dominions became the centre of culture for the Serbs, whose literary revival came from Neusatz, Karlowitz and even Buda. It was not only under Prince Eugene that they looked to the Habsburgs for aid.

Kara George, who led their first serious rising in 1804 more than once offered himself to Vienna.

In the Balkans the Serbs were the first to revolt, and won their own freedom, with less help than Greeks, Roumanians or Bulgarians, and under far less favourable circ.u.mstances. Thus Serbia is essentially a self-made man among States, built from the foundations upwards, and possessing no aristocracy and hardly even a middle cla.s.s. Her curse has been the rivalry of two, or rather three native dynasties, the Karageorgevitch, the Obrenovitch and the Petrovitch; and this rivalry has borne fruit in three dastardly political crimes--the murder of the heroic Black George in 1817, by order of his rival Milosh Obrenovitch; of Prince Michael, Serbia's wisest ruler, by the adherents of George's son; and finally of King Alexander and his wife in June 1903. The history of the Southern Slavs for the last century has been a slow movement towards national unity, overshadowed, sometimes hastened, sometimes paralysed, by the rivalry of Austria and Russia for the hegemony of the Balkan Peninsula. Till 1875 the influence of the two Powers alternated in Belgrade, and there was nothing definite to suggest which influence would win, though of course Russia may be said to have possessed an advantage in her position as the foremost Orthodox power and as the greatest among the Slavonic brotherhood of races.

That year, however, brought a fresh rising of Bosnia and Herzegovina against Turkish rule, and in defence of this purely Serbo-Croat province public opinion in Serbia and Montenegro rose. Side by side the two little princ.i.p.alities fought the Turks and risked their all upon the issue. The provinces were to the last man friendly and welcomed their action. Then, when the battle seemed won, Austria-Hungary at the Congress of Berlin stepped in and occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina--with the active approval of Disraeli and Salisbury. The inhabitants resisted stoutly, but were overcome. Thus was realised the first stage upon the road of the Austrian advance towards Salonica. Serbia received compensation at Nia, Pirot, and Vranja; Montenegro acquired the open roadstead of Antivari and a sc.r.a.p of barren coast-line; but the hearts of both still clung to Bosnia.

Henceforth the friction between Vienna and Belgrade has been permanent, though often latent. It was accentuated by the fact that King Milan was little better than an Austrian agent, the most notorious example of this being the ill-considered and ill-managed war with Bulgaria into which he plunged Serbia at the instigation of the Ballplatz[1](1885). Afterwards, it is true, Vienna intervened to rob the Bulgarians of the fruits of victory and argued that Serbia was thus under her debt; but this cra.s.s application of the principle of _divide et impera_ could not deceive any one. Milan was a man of great ability, but vicious and corrupt. The ceaseless scandals of his private life, the frequent political _coups d'etat_ in which he indulged, tended to confirm the dislike of his subjects for the Austrophilism with which he was identified. Alexander, his son and successor, was even worse; indeed, it is not too much to say that he was the most "impossible" monarch whom Europe has known since the days of the Tsar Paul. His court was characterised by gross favouritism and arbitrary revisions of the const.i.tution; and his position became finally untenable when he committed the fatal error of marrying Draga Mashin, a woman of no position and notorious private character. Two incidents in her tragic story remind us of similar scandals in English history--the fond delusion of Mary Tudor and the legend of Mary of Modena's warming-pan. The last straw was the design, widely attributed to her and the infatuated king, for securing the succession to her brother, who had as little claim to the throne as any other Serbian subject. On June 10, 1903, Alexander and Draga were a.s.sa.s.sinated by a gang of Serbian officers, under circ.u.mstances of the utmost brutality such as nothing can excuse. In the light of recent events, however, it is important to note that both Austria and Russia knew of the plot at least ten days before the murder and did nothing to stop it.[2]

On the day after the crime the _Fremdenblatt_, the organ of the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Office, published a leading article couched in terms of the utmost cynicism, and declaring that it mattered little to Austria-Hungary which dynasty reigned in Serbia. The Serbian Government might have been excused for enclosing a copy of this article in its reply to the Austrian Note of July 23, 1914!

[Footnote 1: The Austro-Hungarian Foreign Office.]

[Footnote 2: In 1908 this was confirmed to me by a distinguished member of the then Austrian Cabinet, since dead, who was certainly in a position to know.]

The Obrenovitch dynasty was thus at an end. Its rival, the Karageorgevitch dynasty, returned to power--naturally under a black cloud of European disgust and suspicion. King Peter is not, however, as black as he has sometimes been painted. He fought gallantly in 1870 as a French officer; as a young man he translated Stuart Mill's _Essay on Liberty_ into Serb, and for a generation he lived by preference in democratic Geneva and in Paris.

Under him Serbia has for the first time enjoyed real const.i.tutional government. Quietly, as occasion arose, the regicides were removed to the background, the old methods of favouritism were steadily discouraged, and it is not too much to say that an entirely new atmosphere has been created in Belgrade since 1903. Among the younger politicians in Serbia, as in other Slavonic countries, the moral influence of Professor Masaryk, the great Czech philosopher and politician, has grown more and more marked.

The depth of Serb aspirations in Bosnia has two obvious grounds--on the one hand, pure national sentiment of the best kind; on the other, the urgent economic need for a seaboard, Serbia being the only inland country in Europe save Switzerland, and not enjoying the latter's favoured position in the immediate vicinity of great world-markets. Austria-Hungary, on her part, set herself deliberately not merely to block this access to the sea, but also to keep Serbia in complete economic dependence. Under the new dynasty the little kingdom showed a keener desire to shake off its va.s.salage and find new markets. The so-called "Pig War"--the breeding of swine is Serbia's staple industry, and the founders of her two rival dynasties were wealthy pig-breeders--proved an unexpected success, for new trade outlets were found in Egypt and elsewhere. But the initial strain hit every peasant in his pocket and thus greatly accentuated the feeling against Austria-Hungary. At this stage came the Young Turk revolution and its sequel, the annexation of Bosnia. To any impartial observer it had been obvious from the first that those who dreamt of Austria-Hungary's voluntary withdrawal from the two provinces were living in a fool's paradise. The formal act of annexation merely set a seal to thirty years of effective Austrian administration, during which the Sultan's rule had been confined to the official celebration of his birthday. Educational and agrarian problems had been neglected, popular discontent had smouldered, but at least great material progress had been made. Roads, railways, public buildings had been created out of nothing, capital had been sunk, a new machine of government had been constructed. Austria had come to stay, and Aehrenthal, in annexing the provinces, felt himself to be merely setting the seal to a doc.u.ment which had been signed a generation earlier. He had failed to reckon with the outcry which this technical breach of international law evoked: like Bethmann-Hollweg, he had no blind faith in "sc.r.a.ps of paper," and had no scruple in tearing up the Treaty of Berlin on which the whole Balkan settlement had rested. Nowhere was the outburst of feeling so violent as in Serbia and Montenegro, who had never ceased to dream of the lost Serb provinces. For some months the two little States challenged the accomplished fact, and seemed bent on staking their very existence upon war with the great neighbouring Monarchy. Aehrenthal remained unmoved by their cries of impotent fury and settled down to a trial of strength with his rival Izvolsky, the Russian Foreign Minister, who encouraged the sister Slavonic States in their resistance. At length in March 1909 Germany stepped forward in "shining armour" to support her Austrian ally, and Russia, to avoid European war, gave way and abandoned the Serbs to their fate. Nothing was left but a humiliating submission: the Serbian Government was obliged to address a Note to the Great Powers, declaring that the annexation and internal condition of Bosnia did not in any way concern her.[1]

[Footnote 1: This declaration was made the basis of the Austrian Note to Serbia in July 1914.]

--5. _The Renaissance of Serbia._--From this diplomatic defeat dates the renaissance of Serbia. It restored her to a sense of hard realities, and taught her to subst.i.tute hard work for loud talk. So rough a challenge put the national spirit on its mettle. The brief period between 1908 and 1912 worked a real transformation in Belgrade, which could not fail to impress those who took the trouble to look beneath the surface. Nowhere was the change more marked than in the Serbian army, from which the regicide elements had been slowly but steadily eliminated. The two Balkan wars of 1912-1913 revealed Serbia to the outside world as a military power, notable alike for the elan of its infantry, the high efficiency of its artillery, the close camaraderie of officers and men. The first use made of her victories over the Turks was the occupation of northern Albania, her only possible outlet to the sea so long as Dalmatia remains in Austrian hands.

Austria-Hungary, who had only remained inactive because she had taken a Turkish victory for granted, now intervened, and by the creation of an artificial Albanian State vetoed Serbia's expansion to the Adriatic. The Austrian Foreign Minister, Count Berchtold, short-sighted and indolent then as now, failed to realise that the North Albanian harbours, for obvious reasons of physical geography, could never be converted into naval bases, save at a prohibitive cost, and that their possession by Serbia, so far from being a menace to Austria, would involve the policing of a mountainous tract of country, inhabited by a turbulent and hostile population. It ought to have been obvious to him that the moment had arrived for tempting the Serbs into the Austrian sphere of influence by the bait of generous commercial concessions through Bosnia and Dalmatia. Several far-sighted politicians in Austria urged this course upon him, and the Serbian Premier actually approached Vienna with far-reaching proposals in this very sense.

Their contemptuous rejection by Berchtold and the little clique of Foreign Office officials who controlled his puppet figure, naturally strengthened still further the bonds which united Belgrade and Petrograd. Serbia, shut out from the Adriatic, had no alternative save to seek her economic outlet down the valley of the Vardar towards the Aegean, and in so doing she came into violent conflict with Bulgarian aspirations in Macedonia. These facts alone would justify the a.s.sertion that the war between the Balkan allies was directly due to Austro-Hungarian initiative; but it has also transpired that the dissensions between Sofia and Belgrade were actively encouraged from Vienna, that Magyar influences were brought to bear upon King Ferdinand, and that war material was sent down the Danube from Hungary to Bulgaria. The outward and visible sign of these intrigues was a speech of the Hungarian Premier, Count Tisza, opposing the Tsar's intervention in favour of peace and virtually inciting Bulgaria to fight it out. The break-up of the Balkan League was the first condition to that Austrian advance on Salonica which has always remained the ideal of the advocates of a forward policy in Vienna and Budapest, and which lies at the root of Austria-Hungary's action in provoking the present war.

Serbia and Montenegro, however, are but one half of the problem. The issues involved are wider and deeper than the quarrels of Vienna and Budapest with Belgrade. Even if every man in Serbia were willingly prostrate before the Habsburg throne, there could be no real peace until the internal problem of Austria-Hungary's Southern Slav provinces is solved. What is at stake is the future of eleven million people, inhabiting the whole tract of country from sixty miles north of Trieste to the centre of Macedonia, from the southern plains of Hungary to the North Albanian frontier. Of these, roughly four millions are in the two independent kingdoms; the remaining seven millions are divided between Austria (the provinces of Dalmatia, Istria, and Carniola) and Hungary (the autonomous kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia), while Bosnia-Herzegovina are governed jointly by Austria and Hungary. The history of these provinces during the past generation is one of neglect and misgovernment. Croatia has been exploited economically by the Magyars, and the narrow interests of Budapest have prevented railway development and hampered local industries by skilful manipulation of tariffs and taxation. A further result is that even to-day Dalmatia (with the exception of Ragusa) has no railway connections with the rest of Europe, and those of Bosnia are artificially directed towards Budapest rather than towards Agram, Vienna, and Western Europe. It is not too much to say that the situation of those provinces had become less favourable (if compared with surrounding standards) than it was at earlier periods of their history; for the old system of trade-routes had broken down there as elsewhere in Europe, but had not been replaced by modern communications.

--6. _Serbo-Croat Unity._--Parallel with the new era inst.i.tuted in Serbia since 1903, a strong movement in favour of national unity took root among her kinsmen across the Austro-Hungarian frontier. The disruptive tendencies which had hitherto been so marked in Croatian politics began to weaken.

The so-called Serbo-Croat Coalition round which all the younger elements speedily rallied, put forward an ambitious programme of constructive democratic reform as the basis of joint political action on the part of both races, and held stubbornly together when the inevitable breach with the Magyar oligarchy occurred. The Magyar Government felt that every effort must be made to restore that discord between Croat and Serb which had been for a generation one of the main pillars of their racial hegemony. These designs happened to coincide with the aims of the Foreign Office in Vienna in connection with the annexation of Bosnia, and Budapest and Vienna combined in a systematic campaign of persecution against the Serbs of Croatia. "Wholesale arrests and charges of treason led up to the monster trial at Agram, which dragged on for seven months amid scandals worthy of the days of Judge Jeffreys. The Diet ceased to meet, the const.i.tution of Croatia was in abeyance, the elections were characterised by corruption and violence such as eclipsed even the infamous Hungarian elections of 1910; the Press and the political leaders were singled out for special acts of persecution and intimidation." These tactics were revealed to the outside world in the notorious Friedjung Trial (December 1909), resulting out of a libel action brought by the Serbo-Croat Coalition leaders against Dr.

Friedjung, the distinguished Austrian historian. The doc.u.ments, on the basis of which he had publicly accused them of being paid agents of the Serbian Government, had been supplied to him by the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Office, and the trial revealed them as impudent forgeries, concocted in the Austro-Hungarian Legation in Belgrade! The moral responsibility for these forgeries was subsequently brought home to Count Forgach, the Minister in Belgrade, and indirectly, of course, to Count Aehrenthal himself as Foreign Minister. But Forgach, though publicly denounced as "Count Azev,"[1] was not allowed to fall into disgrace; on the contrary, he had become within two years of his exposure permanent Under-Secretary at the Ballplatz, and inspirer of new plots to discredit and ruin Serbia.

[Footnote 1: An allusion to the notorious Russian _agent provocateur _who was at one and the same time a member of the secret police and of the revolutionary organisation.]

The scandals of the Friedjung Trial led to the fall of the Governor of Croatia, but there was no change of system. After a temporary truce the old conflict revived, and within eighteen months the friction between Magyars and Croats was as acute as ever. The Magyar Government employed every possible device of administrative pressure in order to create dissensions between the Croat and Serb parties--repeated elections, wholesale corruption and violence, persecution of the Press and of the political leaders. Yet so far from languishing under such a system, the movement for unity gained fresh strength and extended to the kindred Slovenes, striking root even among the extreme Clericals, who had hitherto regarded the Orthodox Serbs with distrust and suspicion.

In the spring of 1912 the conflict culminated in the abolition of the Croatian const.i.tution by the arbitrary decree of the Hungarian Premier, in the appointment of a reactionary official as dictator, and a few months later in the suspension of the charter of the Serb Orthodox Church.

--7. _The Balkan Wars._--Never in history had a more inopportune moment been chosen for such crying illegalities. For close upon the heels of the demonstrations and unrest which they evoked, came the dramatic events of the Balkan War, the crushing victories of the allies, the resurrection of the lost Serb Empire, the long-deferred revenge for the defeat of Kosovo.

The whole Southern Slav provinces of Austria-Hungary were carried off their feet by a wave of enthusiasm for the allies, and an impossibly strained situation was reached when the Government of Vienna placed itself in violent conflict with Serbia, vetoed her expansion to the sea, insisted upon creating a phantom Albanian State, egged on Bulgaria against her allies, and finally mobilised in order to impose its will upon the Serbs.

Every peasant in the Slavonic South naturally contrasted Magyar misrule in Croatia with the splendid achievements of his Serb kinsmen across the frontier. I know of poor villagers in the mountainous hinterland of Dalmatia who, having no money to give to the cause of the Balkan Red Cross, offered casks of country wine or even such clothes and shoes as they could spare from their scanty belongings. The total subscriptions raised among the Southern Slavs of the Monarchy in aid of the allies far exceeded any sums previously raised for charitable purposes among so poor a population.

"In the Balkan sun," said a prominent Croat Clerical, "we see the dawn of our day."

The national rejoicings which "the avenging of Kosovo" evoked among the Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes of Austria-Hungary were accompanied by lively protests against the bare idea of an Austro-Serbian war, which, so far as the Southern Slavs on both sides of the frontier were concerned, would have been a civil war in the most literal sense of the word (and this civil war, it must be remembered, is now actually being waged). The politicians, however, though well-nigh unanimous in their enthusiasm for the cause of the Balkan allies, could not at one breath throw off the habits of a lifetime. Petty jealousies still divided them and were skilfully played upon by the Magyar Government. The strain of five years of opposition and persecution had produced its effect upon the Coalition leaders and rendered them all too p.r.o.ne to further concessions. But the younger generation had been profoundly affected by the Croatian dictatorship and the Balkan wars; at an age when our youth think of nothing but cricket and football, the students and even the schoolboys of Croatia, Dalmatia, and Bosnia became engrossed in political speculation, brooded over the wrongs of their disunited race, and dreamt of Serbia as the new Piedmont of the Balkans. To all alike even the most advanced politician seemed no better than an old fogey, and it is no exaggeration to a.s.sert that the existing parties had lost all hold upon the overwhelming majority of those who in ten years'

time will represent the manhood and the intellect of the race. The widespread nature of the movement may be ill.u.s.trated by the school strike of the spring of 1912, during which every boy and girl above the age of fourteen in most of the primary and secondary schools of Croatia, Dalmatia, and Bosnia played truant as a protest against the misgovernment of Croatia.

On that occasion a crowd of 5000 school children paraded the streets of Agram shouting "Down with Cuvaj" (the Ban or Governor of Croatia), and cheering the police when they tried to intervene!

As in all such movements, the views of individuals varied in intensity: some merely gave a theoretical adherence to the ideals of Mazzini or of Mill, others swallowed the Nihilist doctrine of Bakunin and dreamt of revolution, ushered in by terrorist propaganda. Out of this milieu came the two young a.s.sa.s.sins who murdered the Archduke Francis Ferdinand.

--8. _The Murder of the Archduke_.--By a hideous irony of fate Francis Ferdinand was the one man capable of restoring order to an already desperate internal situation. His very person was a programme and a watchword, and it had long been an open secret that his accession would be the signal for drastic reforms. It was his ambition to supersede the effete Dual system by a blend of centralism and federalism such as would reconcile the national sentiment of individual races with the consciousness of a common citizenship and would at the same time restore to foreign policy the possibility of initiative. This programme involved the emanc.i.p.ation of the non-Magyar races of Hungary from the intolerable racial tyranny of the Magyars, and at the same time a serious attempt to solve the Southern Slav question by unifying the race under Habsburg rule. As his Imperial uncle grew older and feebler, Francis Ferdinand is known to have elaborated his designs, and a regular staff of able lieutenants had grouped themselves round him. But on the very eve of action the strong man was removed, to the scarcely veiled relief of all those elements in the State whose political and racial monopoly was threatened by such far-reaching and beneficial changes.

The circ.u.mstances of the murder are still shrouded in mystery. It is known that no proper measures were taken for the protection of the Archduke and his wife in Bosnia, though it is still impossible to a.s.sign the responsibility for such criminal negligence. It is notorious that in a country like Bosnia, which has for years been infested with police spies and informers, and where every movement of every stranger is strictly under control, so elaborate and ramified a plot could hardly hope to escape the notice of the authorities. It has even been a.s.serted that Princip and Cabrinovic, the two a.s.sa.s.sins, were _agents provocateurs_ in the pay of the police, and though no proof is as yet forthcoming, there is nothing inherently improbable in the idea.[1] Certain it is that the gravest suspicion rests upon those who connived at the disgraceful anti-Serb riots of which Sarajevo was the scene for nearly forty-eight hours after the murder.

[Footnote 1: The fact that they have only been sentenced to terms of imprisonment, while some of their accomplices have been condemned to death, has a much simpler explanation. Both men are under the age of twenty, and therefore by Austrian law immune from the death penalty.]

The murder provided an admirable pretext for aggression against Serbia, and at the same time tended to revive all the latent prejudice with which the country of the regicides was still regarded in the West. Yet those who seek to establish a connection between the crime of Sarajevo and the Serbian Government are on an utterly false scent. I have tried to describe the atmosphere of universal and growing discontent which produced the explosion. Those who 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 a.s.sa.s.sins 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 the 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 a.s.sa.s.sination; 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.

--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 a.s.sumed 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 Serbia was deliberately framed in such a manner as to be unacceptable by any State which valued its self-respect or prestige. The military leaders desired war, while the Foreign Office, already committed for years to a violently Serbophobe policy, was working hand in glove with the German Amba.s.sador Tschirschky, and with the very highest quarters in Berlin. The German Government in its official case admits having given Austria "a free hand against Serbia," while there are good grounds for believing that the text of the Note was submitted to the German Emperor and that the latter fully approved of (if he did not actually suggest) the fatal time-limit of forty-eight hours, which rendered all efforts towards peace hopeless from the outset.

The Austrian case against Serbia, as embodied in this Note, rested upon a secret investigation in the prison of Sarajevo. The persistent rumours that the a.s.sa.s.sins are _agents-provocateurs_, and that pressure of a somewhat drastic kind was brought to bear upon them after their arrest, cannot of course be accepted as proved. But the essential point to bear in mind is the fact that the details of the Austrian "case," as embodied in the notorious Note of July 23, originated in the same quarter as the previous attempts to slander and discredit Serbia. Count Forgach, the arch-forger of the Austrian Legation in Belgrade, was permanent Under-secretary in the Foreign Office, and as Count Berchtold's right hand and prompter in Balkan affairs, was directly responsible for the p.r.o.nounced anti-Serb tendencies which have dominated the foreign policy of the Dual Monarchy since the rise of the Balkan League. As a Magyar n.o.bleman with intimate Jewish connections, Forgach was an invaluable link between Magyar extremist policy and Berlin on the one hand and Salonica and Constantinople on the other.

In view of his record as the inspirer of the Vasic forgeries, we are amply justified in declining to accept any "evidence" prepared by him and his subordinates, and insisting upon a full and open trial of the murderers as the only conceivable foundation for charges of complicity.

When all is said and done, however, the murder of the Archduke, though an event of world-importance so far as the internal development and future of the Dual Monarchy is concerned, is none the less a side-issue in the Southern Slav question. This seeming paradox will not surprise those who consider the currents of national life among the Southern Slavs. The diplomatic conflict between Belgrade and Vienna or Budapest is but the outcome of a far deeper and wider movement. We are witnessing the birth-throes of a new nation, the rise of a new national consciousness, the triumph of the idea of National Unity among the three Southern Slav sisters--the Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes. Fate has a.s.signed to Britain and to France an important share in the solution of the problem, and it is our duty to insist that this solution shall be radical and permanent, based upon the principle of Nationality and the wishes of the Southern Slav race.

Only by treating the problem as an organic whole, by avoiding patchwork remedies and by building for a distant future, can we hope to remove one of the chief danger-centres in Europe.