V4unm mtiittsmisammxmuiimBKmsiai k.«i}..v.. •MiMMniaaaammvaDnM International University Booksellers Ltd. 94. Gower Street London W.C. I UCSB LIBRARY ^'>^^ /^< GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR BY THE SAME AUTHOR Racial Problems in Hungary. By Scotus Viator. 1908 (Constable & Co.). i6s. net. With 42 Illustra- tions. (Czech translation, 191 1, Brlinn.) Corruption and Reform in Hungary : a Study of Electoral Practice. 191 1 (Constable & Co.). 4s. 6d. net. (Enlarged German edition, 1912, Leipzig.) The Southern Slav Question and, the Habsburg Monarchy. 191 1 (Constable). 12s.6d.net. (Greatly enlarged German edition, 1913, Berlin.) Absolutism in Croatia. 1912 (Constable & Co.). 25. net. The War and Democracy. Jointly with A. E. Zimmern, J. Dover Wilson, and A. Greenwood. 1914 (Macmillan & Co.). 2s. net. (Swedish edition, 1915.) Roumania and the Great War. 1915 (Constable & Co.). 2s. net. The Balkans, Italy, and the Adriatic. 1915 (Nisbet &. Co.). IS. net. What is at Stake in the War? (Papers for War Time, No, 35.) 1915. 2d. net. In preparation The Rise of Nationality in the Balkans. GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR A STUDY IN THE ORIGINS OF THE GREAT WAR BY R. W. SETON-WATSON, D.Litt. Lecturer in East European History, King's College, University of London LONDON WILLIAMS AND NORGATE 14 HENRIETTA STREET. COVENT GARDEN, W.C. 1916 SERBO-CROAT ORTHOGRAPHY § = sh in English " ship." c = ch „ " church." (i = (the same, softer), c = ts in Enghsh " cats." j=y „ "you." 2 z= j in French "jour." nj = n in EngUsh " new." g = g „ "got." PREFATORY NOTE This little volume is based in the main upon lectures delivered at the London School of Economics, at University College, London, and at the Royal Society of Arts. Most of Chapter VI has already appeared in the Journal of the latter Society, while the germ of the concluding chapter is to be found in my "What is at Stake in the War" (No. 35 of Papers for War Time), published in June 1915, and in an article in the Contemporary Review for April. R. W. S.-W. May I, 1916. edNTENTS PART I AUSTRIA-HUNGARY AND THE SOUTHERN SLAVS CHAPTER I. THE DUAL MONARCHY II. THE HUNGARIAN CONSTITUTION . III. MAGYAR RACIAL POLICY . IV. THE GENESIS OF SERBIA . V. THE IDEA OF SOUTHERN SLAV UNITY PAGE • 9 . i6 . 29 . 48 . 82 PART II THE PAN-GERMAN PLAN VI. "central EUROPE" AND " BERLIN-BAGDAD " . 121 VII. BOHEMIA AS A RAMPART AGAINST PAN-GERMANISM I51 VIII. THE PAN-GERMAN PLAN AND ITS ANTIDOTE . I7I BIBLIOGRAPHY • • . 188 INDEX • ■ • 193 MAPS — THE NEW EUROPE, ON A BASIS OF NATIONALITY • • . 146 " MITTELEUROPA " . • « . 175 PART I AUSTRIA-HUNGARY AND THE SOUTHERN SLAVS CHAPTER I THE DUAL MONARCHY Forty years ago one of the most distinguished French historians, Albert Sorel, wrote as follows : ^' For a century past attempts have been made to solve the Eastern Question. On the day when it appears to have been solved, Europe will inevitably be confronted by the Austrian Question." And as far back as 1870 a far-sighted Russian, General Fadejev, wrote : " The Oriental Question is not to be solved in the Balkans, nor the Polish Question in Warsaw, nor that of the Black Sea on the Bosphorus ; all three are held together by a common knot, which lies on the middle Danube . . . the Eastern Question is a Slav Question, and can only be solved in Vienna." These two quotations form a suitable introduction to a survey of the Austro-Hungarian problem in its relations to the Balkans and to the world war. Among the many things which this war has thrown into the melting-pot, Austria-Hungary is the greatest and the most difficult to understand. No matter how 9 10 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR we approach the subject, whether from a political, a racial, a constitutional, a social, or an economic point of view, the issues are equally complicated and diffi- cult to sum up. Austria-Hungary is not a state like other European states, and cannot be judged by the same standards. Above all, political terms and values are not the same in Austria as in Hungary, or in either as in other countries. A clever diplomatist, after six months' residence in Vienna, made the remark that nothing happened in Austria as it does elsewhere ; and this fact must be grasped at the outset by any student of the problem. Moreover, generalization is impossible in a country of eleven main races, ten prin- cipal languages, and twenty-three legislative bodies. Austria- Hungary, as it stands to-day, is the creation of a single family, the House of Habsburg, and even to-day is still regarded by them as a kind of dynastic "preserve." The famous Austrian motto, "Bella gerant alii, til, felix Austria, nube (" Let others wage war ; do thou marry, O fortunate Austria "), reminds us of the three famous marriages which won for successive princes the heiresses of Burgundy and the Nether- lands, of Spain and the Indies, and of Bohemia and Hungary, and thus changed the face of Europe and profoundly modified the future of the human race. But the Habsburgs built also upon the surer founda- tion of geography. The bulk of their motley provinces is grouped round the great river system of the Danube, and, save for the two political excrescences of Galicia and Dalmatia, may be said to form in some sense a geographical unit, despite all its political and racial diversity, or at least a combination of several geographical units. At the very outset it is necessary to emphasize the essential difference between Austria and Hungary, THE DUAL MONARCHY 11 which is well typified by a modern banknote of the Monarchy. On the one side the inscription is in German, but the essential detail of its value is repeated in each of the seven languages of Austria. On the other side the entire inscription is in Magyar only, the other six languages of the country being ignored. A sarcastic proverb of the Monarchy tells us that " the Orient begins at Bruck on the Leitha " ; and it has sometimes been hinted that it really begins on the Ringstrasse, the great thoroughfare of Vienna itself. Two Croat politicians, to whom the present writer was showing Oxford, once played with the same idea, by describing themselves as a European and an Asiatic respectively, because the one hailed from the Austrian province of Dalmatia and the other from the Hungarian satrapy of Slavonia. Jocular overstatements of this kind merely serve to draw attention to the radical difference of outlook between the two states of the Dual Monarchy. Austria's besetting sin has been superficiality and apathy, coupled none the less with a growing sense of tolerance, while Hungary has fallen more and more a prey to political and racial tyranny and reaction, and to that arrogance of power which inevitably brings in its train political corruption. It is no exaggeration to say — and it cannot be repeated too often — that the Great War is as emphatically a Magyar war as it is a German war. In August 1914 two currents met, the one from Berlin, the other from Budapest, over the prostrate body of Vienna ; and it may safely be maintained that without Buda- pest the necessary circuit could not have been established. What are the chief factors which make for union in Austria-Hungary ? First unquestionably comes the 12 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR dynasty ; and it would be difficult to overestimate the power exercised by the dynastic tradition upon the many races under Habsburg sway. The House of Habsburg has produced a number of strongly marked characters from the days of the first Rudolf and of Maximilian, last of the mediaeval knights, to those of Ferdinand and Leopold, those paragons of Jesuit influence in high places. But it is in the last century and a half that the personal influence of the dynasty has been most decisive. Upon Maria Theresa, one of the greatest women sovereigns in history, it is unnecessary to dwell here. Her son Joseph II, despite various defects of character and imagination, left his mark upon Europe as the ideal of a benevolent despot in the so-called Age of Enlightenment. Scarcely less profound was the influence of a far smaller man, Joseph's nephew, Francis I, whose small- minded, pettifogging nature is responsible for so much that is evil in the Austria of the last eighty years, and who was saved from positive disaster by the shallow genius (for genius can be shallow as well as deep) of his great minister Metternich. Finally there is the QEdipean figure of Francis Joseph, who has governed for sixty-seven years on the basis of two conflicting principles, Viribiis unitis and Divide et Itnpera, and who is credited with the phrase that in order to understand Austria it is necessary to have ruled over her for fifty years. Francis Joseph has combined a deep sense of duty with personal tact and self-effacement, and the length and vicissitudes of his reign have naturally given him great experience. But his outlook has been consistently shallow and uninspired by any great idea, and he has always fol- lowed the line of least resistance. It is no accident that that Austrian premier whom Francis Joseph THE DUAL MONARCHY 13 retained longest in office, and who enjoyed his con- fidence as far as any minister ever did so, should have been responsible for the open proclamation of Fort- wursteln (jogging along) as the chief dogma of his political creed. Nothing shows more clearly Francis Joseph's lack of any policy or idea save the purely dynastic, than the almost rudderless course which he followed during the so-called era of constitutional experiment during 1859-67. Throughout his reign there are repeated traces in him of that typically Habsburg attitude which tests the usefulness of every subject according to his inclusion or exclusion from the class of " patriots for me," Classical examples of that outlook are his attitude to General Benedek, the vanquished of Koniggratz, and to Admiral Tegetthoff, the victor of Lissa. Nothing illustrates better the vast fund of personal devotion to the dynasty than the calm with which his rank ingratitude was accepted by the country at large. Next in influence to the dynasty as a unifying force come the Joint Army and the Officers' Corps. It is among them that the true " Habsburg" or "Austrian" tradition is to be found in its purest form. The Austrian officers are less of a caste than their German colleagues, and the fact that they are drawn from a much more mixed class, and that the highest aris- tocracy holds aloof to a surprising degree, has -created an atmosphere which any mere stranger entering Austria through Germany could not fail to welcome with relief. This war has proved what was already suspected, that the highest command was by no means beyond reproach, and that at the other end of the scale disaffection was rife among many regi- ments as the result of intense racial feeling. But the very transformation which German officers have 14 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR worked in Austro- Hungarian army organization since the spring of 1915 is a clear proof of the possibiHties of the Joint Army as a unifying force. Hardly less important is the Catholic Church, which is all-powerful in Austria and enormously strong in Hungary, though there the Protestants and Orthodox are also present in large numbers. The power of the Jesuit Order has survived in Austria as elsewhere its temporary eclipse, and the great wealth of the religious orders and of many episcopal sees has been consistently employed for the furtherance of political aims. It is significant that the strongest clerical party which Austria has hitherto produced — the Christian Socialist party, under its great leader, Dr. Lueger, the late Mayor of Vienna — has always been specially identified with that Im- perialist movement known as the " Great Austrian," which enjoyed the sympathies of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand. The moral standards of Catholi- cism in Austria-Hungary vary very greatly according to the particular nationality. Not unnaturally it is most corrupt where it is richest — among the Germans and the Magyars. But not even a passing reference to the Church would be admissible without em- phasizing the patriotism of the clergy and the great part which they have played in all the various national m.ovements of the Monarchy. Side by side with the Church stands the bureaucracy with its tradi- tions of red tape, small-mindedness, slowness of move- ment, and Gemiithlichkeit — that elusive quality which is so characteristic of the " Altosterreicher " and which defies translation. Its least lovely side is the elaborate police system which still survives from the era of Met- ternich and Bach, and its methods of espionage, to which we shall have to refer later. Already four main factors have been mentioned, THE DUAL MONARCHY 15 and yet the aristocracy has inevitably not yet been included. In Austria its power is not as great as might be expected, and is steadily decreasing. The exclusiveness of the Court, with its immovable standard of thirty-two quarterings as indispensable to admission, is as rigid to-day as in the days of the Spanish Habsburgs. But signs are not wanting that the Austrian aristocracy may eventually find itself in a situation not dissimilar to that of the Faubourg St. Germain under the Third Republic. In Hungary, on the other hand, its influence is still enormous ; indeed, Hungary is run by a triple combination of the Magnates, the Gentry, and the Jews. In 1848 it was the Magyar aristocracy which led the movement for political and economic reform, just as earlier in the century it had played a memorable jpart in the intel- lectual revival. But since 1848 it has fallen more and more a prey to reactionary influences, alike in the field of politics, agrarian reform, and economic progress. Not the least interesting fact with regard to Austro- Hungary's share in the war is the secondary part played in it by the Austrian and even by the Hungarian aristocracy. It is only after these five factors that we can fairly count the parliaments and representative government ; and yet there are no fewer than twenty-three legislative bodies in the Monarchy — the two central parliaments of Vienna and Budapest, entirely distinct from each other ; the two Delegations ; the provincial diets, seventeen in Austria and one in Croatia ; and the diet of Bosnia, where every legislative act requires the ratification of the Joint Minister of Finance and of the Austrian and Hungarian Governments. CHAPTER II THE HUNGARIAN CONSTITUTION There is a tendency in England not to distinguish sufficiently between Austria and Hungary, nor to realize that they are two entirely separate entities — a tendency due no doubt in part to the simple fact that it is easier and more convenient to say "Austria" than "Austria-Hungary." Of course it is true that the political expression " Austria- Hungary " or "Austro- Hungarian Monarchy" dates only from the year 1867. But whatever view may be taken of the Compromise of that year (and to this we shall have to return later) it must be realized that this essential distinction or contrast between Austria and Hungary is not a modern fact, but dates back for many centuries. Six great landmarks stand out from Hungarian history: the coming of the Magyars in 896 (a date assigned by tradition on a somewhat doubtful historic basis); the famous Golden Bull of 1222, l • Magna Charta of Eastern Europe ; the battle of Mohacs in 1526, which ushered in the Turkish conquest; the Pragmatic Sanction of 1723; the Revolution of 1848; and the Ausgleich, or Compromise, of 1867. It may be stated as a fact, not as a mere paradox, that in Hungary the Middle Ages end in 1848. From that year of revolution date almost all the 16 THE HUNGARIAN CONSTITUTION 17 reforms upon which the modern Hfe of Hungary is based. Indeed, the March Laws, as they are called, were a sort of legal torrent which suddenly seemed to burst the dams of centuries. The Habsburg Monarchy, as we have already hinted, rests upon historic tradition — upon centuries of dynastic policy applied to vary- ing provincial needs and standards, on a basis of geography ; and nothing is stranger and more per- plexing to the superficial observer than the contrast between historic tradition and what a modern Austrian political thinker has well called " the unhis- toric nations." Nowhere in the Monarchy is that historic tradition so strong, so rigidly enforced, so inexorable, as in Hungary. The Magyar mind is an extraordinary blend of fantasy and legalism. Even the most crying injustice is clothed in elaborate legal forms. It is scarcely necessary to point out that the Magyars are of Asiatic origin, belonging to what it is now the fashion to describe as the Ural-Altaic or Finno-Ugric branch of the human race, claiming kinship with the Huns, Finns, and Turks, and speaking an agglutinative language which bears no resemblance to any European tongue. This origin, despite all the racial admixtures which have come to them throughout the centuries, is still traceable to-day in their temperament and political outlook. It is not uninteresting to contrast their fate with that of another kindred tribe, the Bulgarians, who almost at once discarded their original language, and were already talking some kind of Slavonic when the two great Slav apostles, Cyril and Methodius, preached to them, as contemporaries of Egbert. After being a terror to Europe for over a century, the Magyars accepted Christianity towards the end of the tenth century. Their first king, St. Z 18 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR Stephen, received his crown from a papal legate in the year looo ; hence the title of Apostolic Majesty, which is still borne by the Kings of Hungary. Under Stephen and his successors of the dynasty of Arpad, Hungary became one of the most powerful mediaeval kingdoms in Europe ; and that greatness increased rather than diminished under the Angevin dynasty of the fourteenth century. Croatia was conquered in 1102, though she retained an autonomous position under the Holy Crown of St. Stephen. After this Hungary was en- gaged in continual contests with the Venetian republic for the possession of the Dalmatian coast. Through ties of marriage her claims were extended to Naples, and her suzerainty, ill-defined and fluctuating, but sometimes quite effective, was asserted over Bosnia in the west and Wallachia in the east. In the fifteenth century Hungary became the soul of the defence of Christendom against the Turk. After the mediaeval Serbian state had received its death-blow on the field of Kosovo (1389) the leadership devolved upon Hungary and Moldavia. It was King Sigismund of Hungary, better known as Emperor and as the betrayer of John Hus, whose crusade to save Bulgaria from the Turkendedso disastrously at Nicopolis in 1396. It was King Vladislav of Hungary who led the last serious crusade in aid of the Eastern Empire ; and his complete defeat and death at the battle of Varna in 1444 was the sure prelude of the fall of Constantinople nine years later. But the chief glory of this defence, which earned for Hungary the title of *' propugnaculum celeberrimum christianitatis," was John Hunyady, whose armies on different occasions held Belgrade, Sofia, and Sarajevo. Hunyady, as the son of a Roumanian voivode and a Magyar mother, is himself a proof that Nationality in its modern sense was not an THE HUNGARIAN CONSTITUTION 19 issue in the Hungary of his day. His son Matthias Corvinus hves in history as the national King of Hungary, and holds a place in the popular imagination beside St. Stephen and Louis Kossuth. And yet despite his undoubted greatness the verdict of history must condemn him. He squandered the resources of Hungary in reckless expansion to the north and west ; he fought Bohemia — the Bohemia of that far greater national King George Podiebrad — and Austria, instead of fighting the Turks and preparing his country for the inevitable struggle. His work to the north collapsed on his death, and the country, which thanks to his father's genius had arrested the Turkish flood for two generations, sank under his immediate suc- cessors through the stages of exhaustion and lethargy to defeat and utter ruin. In 1526 Hungary was virtually wiped out of existence by the issue of a single battle. A brief passing allusion may be made to the modern controversies as to which race really saved Europe from the Turks. The Germans, the Magyars, the Poles, and the Roumanians claim to have done so by their victories, the Serbians and Bulgarians by their self-immolation. In reality each deserves a portion of the credit ; each in turn may be said to have held the breach ; none could have done it un- aided. In this connection it should never be forgotten, that those who speak of Balkan savagery are not merely oblivious of the events of the past two years in Belgium, Bosnia, Poland, and Armenia, but also ignore the fact that the Serb, the Bulgarian, and the Roumanian, each in his own way and in his own degree, suffered centuries of national extinction or decay in order that Western Europe might pursue undisturbed its task of civilization. And here we may 20 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR freely recognize that Hungary also suffered, not perhaps actual extinction, but conquest, ravage, and depopulation in the cause of European liberty. The battle of Mohacs is a decisive date in Hun- garian history, not only because the king, and u^ith him his dynasty, perished, but above all because it led to that connection with Austria and the House of Habsburg which has never since ceased. To assert that Hungary temporarily disappeared would be an overstatement ; indeed, it is more correct to say that from 1526 to the close of the seventeenth century there were three Hungaries. (i) The great central plains were occupied by the Turks, and for one hundred and forty years a Pasha held sway at Buda. The purest Magyar population was under the yoke, and some of the most fertile districts of Southern Hungary became almost depopulated. (2) Transylvania, which had long enjoyed a peculiar and ill-defined position of its own, now became an independent principality, under princes chosen from the Magyar nobility, but paying tribute to the Sultan, and far more immune from invasion than the districts lying farther west. (3) The western and northern districts, including the whole territory inhabited by the Slovaks, were held by Ferdinand of Habsburg and his successors. Thus the town of Pressburg (Pozs- ony) rapidly acquired importance as the meeting- place of the Diet, chiefly owing to its proximity to Vienna ; and it continued to remain the centre of political life until the year 1847. Hungary, like Bohemia, had to choose between Turkey and Austria. For the first century after Mohacs a kind of Trialism prevailed between Ger- man Austria, Slav Bohemia, and Hungary. As M. Eisenmann and other historians have clearly shown, THE HUNGARIAN CONSTITUTION 21 this conglomeration was essentially due to external pressure, though geographical influences are not to be ignored. Two rival currents were noticeable, on the one hand the strong traditions of two of the most powerful mediaeval kingdoms, on the other hand the far-sighted ambitions of a dynasty to whom both Hungary and Bohemia were means, not an end in themselves. The two main aims for which they were to be exploited were the reconstruction and mainte- nance of the mediaeval Empire under the House of Habsburg efi permanence, and at the same time the triumph of the Roman Church and the extermination of heresy. The pursuit of these two aims gradually threw into relief the double character and vacillating nature of Habsburg policy. It was not for nothing that the Habsburg emblem has been a double-headed eagle, facing both ways — westwards to Germany and Italy, eastwards to Hungary and the Balkans. That emblem is a suggestive allegory for the history of three centuries, and the events of the Great War show that its meaning is not yet exhausted. The Habsburgs of the seventeenth century were bigoted and fanatical. "The downfall of Hussite Bohemia, the destruction of its independent existence, its religious faith, its language and national feeling, was made to precede the redemption of Hungary from the Turks ; and parallel with that process went the Jesuit and Ultramontane movement, which reclaimed, by persuasion and Court pressure, the Hungarian nobility from the Protestantism into which they had so largely fallen, and then employed against the peasantry and townsmen of Northern Hungary the same methods of blood tribunals, dragoonings, and massacre as were employed in contemporary Scotland against the Covenanters. Intellectual and religious 22 GERMAN, SLAY, AND MAGYAR liberty having received its death-blow for the time, the recovery of lost territory from the Turks could be taken in hand. The hero of this forward movement was Prince Eugene, whose name will always be asso- ciated with the most glorious period in Austrian mili- tary history and has once more become the watchword of Imperialist dreamers. In 1686 Buda had b^en recovered, in 1718 Belgrade and half of present-day' Serbia were added to the Habsburg dominions, which thus reached their farthest point of expansion south- wards between the days of Hunyady and Mackensen. Hungary once more became a single whole ; for her the eighteenth century is a period of exhaustion and recuperation, following upon the long stress of alien domination. All energies were devoted to the coloni- zation of deserted and devastated lands, and to the consolidation of the Magnates, the Church, and the Bureaucracy, the three factors upon which Maria Theresa relied. But Hungary did not share Bohe- mia's fate. The native Bohemian nobility had been almost extinguished, her constitution abolished, her language and traditions covered over by a thick crust of Germanization. Hungary, on the other hand, though the attempt of her " Kurucz " extremists to break away from Habsburg rule and attain complete independence utterly failed (1703-11), none the less managed to reassert her whole constitutional and political situation, and to preserve her local institu- tions in such a way as to prepare the ground for the national revival of the nineteenth century. The Hungarian constitution is famous as one of the most ancient in Europe. Its Great Charter, the Golden Bull, dates from 1222, only seven years later than Magna Charta. It bears many resemblances to the English constitution, which modern Anglophiles in THE HUNGARIAN CONSTITUTION 23 Hungary — and, it must be added, those whose object it has been to throw dust in the eyes of British pubHc opinion as to the true poHtical situation in modern Hungary — are never tired of emphasizing. The mys- tical attributes of the Holy Crown of St. Stephen, which play so great a part in the Hungarian constitu- tional theory of to-day, form an interesting parallel to the theories of kingship in vogue in Stuart times. There is, however, one vital and fundamental differ- ence between the English and the Hungarian consti- tutions — namely, the position of the nobility in the two countries. The word " noble " does not connote the same meaning in Hungary as farther west. Noble were all those who enjoyed political privileges. Till 1840 Latin was the ofBcial language of the country, and in that Latin the term for the political nation was " populus," which we should naturally translate as "people." But "populus" contrasted in Hungarian law with "plebs" — "Misera plebs contribuens," that phrase of ominous meaning, to describe the mass of oppressed and unenfranchised people who enjoyed no political rights of any kind. The grant of nobility was frequent and widespread ; sometimes whole villages received it for services in war, and thus in practice there was a far wider franchise in the eighteenth cen- tury in Hungary than in England. But, on the other hand, for the century preceding the revolution of 1848, the essential fact in the political situation was that only the populus could vote, while only the plebs could pay taxes — a delightful application of the prin- ciple " Heads I win, tails you lose 1 " In both countries a caste system prevailed, with this essential difference, that in Hungary the helot might often be admitted to the ruling caste, but thence- forward remained aloof from the class which he had 24 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR left, whereas in England the noble's younger son invariably sank back into the commons of the realm, and thus effectually prevented the rise of any iron barrier such as prevailed in Hungary. Another scarcely less significant difference was the lack of influence of the towns and their represen- tatives upon the life of the Hungarian nation. Within their own walls they enjoyed charters and privileges of the most far-reaching kind, but the right of their dele- gates in the central parliament was always challenged. Under the unreformed constitution each county sent two delegates from its local assembly. Each of the royal free towns did likewise, but their votes were not allowed to count on a par with their county colleagues ; they were simply massed together, with the result that on a division one county weighed as much as all the towns together, who were thus impotent for anything beyond mere talk. The most striking feature in the Golden Bull was the famous clause legalizing insurrection against the king under certain circumstances. This was abrogated at the Diet of 1687 in gratitude for the recovery of Buda from the Turks. At the same time elective monarchy was superseded by hereditary. On the complete expulsion of the Turks the dynasty again received its reward. The Pragmatic Sanction of 1723, which secured the succession to the House of Habs- burg in the male line of Maria Theresa's descendants in perpetuity, is the genesis of the Dual System of 1867, for it creates for the first time machinery for joint affairs between Hungary and Austria. Its spirit was to be repeatedly violated ; but at any rate in theory Hungary's individual existence was once more as clearly and definitely recognized as before Mohacs. This fact bore fruit on that historic occasion when, THE HUNGARIAN CONSTITUTION 25 on the eve of war against Frederick the Great, the young Empress appeared before the assembled nobles at Pressburg with the infant Joseph in her arms, and was greeted by the tumultuous cry, " Vitam et san- guinem pro rege nostro, Maria Theresia." What is less generally known is the fact that this scene was preceded by long and keen bargaining, as the result of which the nobles secured immunity from taxation. This, then, was the origin of that peculiarly unequal arrangement to which we have already referred, by which the nobles alone enjoyed political rights and the non-nobles alone paid the bill. The whole inci- dent is very typical of the strange blend of chivalry and legalism in the Magyar mind. The remainder of the eighteenth century was taken up by a series of experiments in benevolent despotism. The reforms instituted by Maria Theresa in adminis- tration, education, law, land-tenure, and church organization were extended on radical and extremely doctrinaire lines by Joseph II. Unhappily his many sterling merits were vitiated by his insistence upon Germanization as the keystone of the arch. His whole internal policy ended in disastrous failure ; for it kindled into flame the very spirit of Nationality which he desired to exorcise. Even his agrarian reforms shared the fate of other less admirable innovations, and feudal dues and bondage were reimposed upon the peasants. In 1790 his successor Leopold II re- affirmed all the constitutional liberties of Hungary ; and the eventful legislation of his brief reign was concentrated in a single phrase : " Hungary is to be governed according to its own laws and customs and not after the manner of the other provinces." The period which followed was ushered in by the French Revolution and by the sudden bursting of 26 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR the dams of Nationality all over Europe. The political ferment and literary revival to which this gave rise in Hungary was not strong enough to prevent Francis I, after the Congress of Vienna, from break- ing all his pledges and suspending constitutional life. But the revival of the Magyar language and literature went on apace, parallel with the no less intense but less powerful national movements among the Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, and Serbs ; and a galaxy of poets, dramatists, and novelists provided the background to the political movement. Finally, in 1825, even Francis and Metternich had to consent to the Hungarian parliament reassembling, and from that moment the constitutional movement became irresistible. The next twenty years laid anew the foundations upon which later generations were to build. The year 1830 saw the establishment of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, its lack of funds having been overcome in dramatic fashion, when Count Stephen Szechenyi, " the greatest Magyar " as his admiring compatriots still call him, rose from his seat in the Diet and offered for this cause his entire income for the year, and when his example was immediately followed by a number of other magnates. In the same year a knowledge of Magyar was made obligatory for all persons holding any public office or an advocate's diploma. In 1835 its use was extended to the law courts, though still as an alternative to Latin, while Magyar was made an optional language for all official documents and obligatory for the register in all parishes where Magyar services were held. In 1839 the Addresses to the Throne were for the first time drawn up in the Magyar language, and in the follow- ing year a law was passed by which Magyar superseded Latin as the official language of the Government and THE HUNGARIAN CONSTITUTION 27 of parliament. Its knowledge was enjoined upon the clergy of all denominations, while all registers were to become exclusively Magyar after a lapse of three more years. Finally, in 1843 Magyar was proclaimed as the exclusive language of the legislature, the government, and official business, and also of public instruction, though this latter innovation was left to be dealt with by a special law. In spite of the vigorous protests of the Croatian delegates it was further laid down that these provisions should be extended after a lapse of only six years to the autonomous kingdom of Croatia- Slavonia — an act of folly for which the Magyars were to pay dearly in the revolution of 1848. In the five years which separated this eventful legislation from the great European explosion, the great popular tribune Louis Kossuth fought vigorously in a double cause — on the one hand for liberty of the Press, for modern constitutional reform, and for the moderniza- tion of Hungarian political and agrarian life — aims which won for him the admiration and enthusiasm of Europe — and on the other hand for racial monopoly of the harshest and most iniquitous kind, pressed with such excess as to rally against him and the Magyars as a whole all the other races of the country. By a cruel irony of fate the champions of Nationality were driven to support a reactionary dynasty and the organizers of absolutism, while the champions of constitutional and political reform were pushing a policy of forcible assimilation against all the other races. When in 1848 the great crash came, Hungary was in the very van of reform. After a winter of debate and excitement the news from Paris kindled the Hungarian parliament into a perfect paroxysm of activity. Never were so many radical reforms adopted in such feverish haste and with so little discussion. 28 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR In one short month Hungary was transformed in theory from a mediaeval to a modern state. A re- sponsible Hungarian Cabinet and executive replaced the old mediaeval paraphernalia of the Councils of Lieutenancy and the Aulic Chancellory. Annual par- liaments, triennial elections, and a new and direct franchise were introduced. The exemption of the nobles from taxation was abolished. Serfdom, feudal dues, and seignorial courts were swept away, the landlords receiving money compensation. Liberty of the Press and religious equality were established. A national guard and a national Magyar university were founded. Transylvania was united to Hungary, in defiance of the wishes of a vast majority of its inhabitants.^ It was, however, one thing to vote and another thing to execute such a programme. The ambiguity with which the vital question of Common Affairs is treated, left free play for the most dangerous interpretations, and kindled the alarm and hostility of the reactionary advisers whom the dangers of revolution had rallied round the Emperor ; while the intolerant attitude of the Magyars towards the neighbouring races paved the way for their isolation and consequent undoing. ' The Transylvanian Diet voted union under mob terrorism. CHAPTER III MAGYAR RACIAL POLICY The many rival schools of political theory regarding the State may fairly accurately be grouped under two main heads : that of Historic Right and that of the Natural Rights of Man. Both have been exaggerated by their devotees, and have slowly, almost surrep- titiously, been transformed, until the whole world suddenly recognized them amid the clash of arms as the Theory of Brute Force and the Theory of Nationality. Germany, under the influence of Treit- schke and Houston Chamberlain, has carried the one to impossible lengths ; it is our duty to prevent the other from being exaggerated in its turn. Both theories are thoroughly sound within their proper limits, but we must be quite sure as to the meaning of Historic Right. If we regard the present and the future as the projections of the past, alike of its wisdom and its folly, if we seek to preserve historic continuity and to keep the moving columns unbroken, though without ever abandoning the advance, then Historic Right acquires unanswerable force, and neither Con- servative, Liberal, nor Socialist will dissociate himself from it, even though each may differ as to what lies beyond the range of hills to which all are moving. But if Historic Right merely means the maintenance 30 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR of legalized privileges, or, as M. Albert Sorel calls it, " a principle for the perpetuation of abuse," then we are already on the path which leads to Kossuth's answer to the Serbs, " the sword must decide " ; to Coloman Tisza's declaration in parliament, " there is no Slovak nation"; and to William II's famous phrase, " Him who disobeys me, I shall crush." The doctrine of Historic Right in its extreme form is a reaction from the French Revolution, the intention being " to oppose the rights of man, based on human reason, by the rights of states " ; but the historic rights of existing states and nations must be brought into line with the needs and aspirations of what a brilliant German-Austrian Socialist thinker, Carl Renner, has called " the Unhistoric Nations." Staatsrecht is in- dispensable and desirable, but it must not become a fetish. There is no country in Europe where the conflict between these rival theories has assumed so acute a form as in Hungary, nor where the need for adjust- ment was so crying even before the war. In studying this conflict every serious student of modern Hungary who dares to look below the surface is at once con- fronted by a glaring contrast between theory and practice. Those who take the trouble to study the laws of Hungary since 1848, to study them not merely in theory but in practice, and to compare their text not with the ex parte statements of enemies, but with the official reports and statistics and other publications of the Magyar Government itself, will find that many of the best of them have remained a dead letter from the first, and, so far as the outside world is concerned, have performed the function of an ornamental facade to an unfinished interior, which is not accessible to the general public. MAGYAR RACIAL POLICY 31 The events of March 1848 may be said to have " rushed " the dynasty and its reactionary advisers. As soon as they found breath, they tried to recall the concessions that had been made, while the Mag- yars by their policy of fanaticism and repression had " goaded into madness against them " all the other races of the Crown of St. Stephen. ^ The result was one of the most hideous racial wars in modern history. When the Hungarian Revolution was at last sup- pressed in August 1849 by the aid of 180,000 Russian troops, there followed an era of extreme reaction, generally known as the Bach system, from Alexander Bach, the able revolutionary turned clerical and bureaucrat. For ten years all liberties were sup- pressed, and Austria rested on the three pillars of Absolutism, Centralization, and Germanization. A league of the Bureaucracy, the Army, and the Church, under the half-passive consent of the dynasty, tem- porarily revived, in a less crude but none the less effective form, the police state of Metternich and Sedlnitzky. Such a regime satisfied no one ; and its effects from a racial point of view were neatly summed up by the Magyar exile Pulszky, when he asserted that the Magyars " received as punishment what the other races received as reward." As so often in Austria, it was external events which produced the inevitable crash. The Italian war of 1859, ending in the loss of Lombardy, spelt the political bankruptcy of the Bach system ; and, indeed, the State was but a few steps from real financial bankruptcy. Francis Joseph and his advisers found themselves forced to modify the autocratic tendencies of the preceding ten years. * This was the accusing phrase which Szechenyi himself directed against Kossuth. 32 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR The period from i860 to 1867 was one of constitu- tional experiment, marked by indecision and half measures ; as always throughout his long reign, Francis Joseph followed the line of least resistance. As Palacky, the greatest of Bohemian historians, has well said, " There are three possible political systems in Austria — Centralism, which gives the hegemony to the Germans ; Dualism, which divides it between the Germans and the Magyars ; and Federalism, which secures equality of rights to all the races of the Monarchy." Francis Joseph vacillated between the Centralist and Federal solutions until he had spoiled both, and finally adopted the fatal Dual system, which has been the ruin of modern Austria. The Dual system rests upon the famous Compromise or Ausgleich of February 1867. Of the main factors which produced it, some are of prime historical im- portance, while others almost deserve the name of personal and accidental. The event which brought matters to a head was, of course, the disastrous war of 1866, which expelled Austria from Germany and Italy, and disturbed the centre of gravity in the Habsburg outlook. Francis Joseph, who had re- buffed the proposals of Napoleon III with the words : " Sire, I am a German prince," found himself shoved eastward by the force of circumstances. The Eastern head of the Austrian double-eagle assumed fresh importance ; and it was no other than Bismarck — for motives which it would take a whole book to elucidate, and to which the present war supplies a striking commentary — who advised the substitution of Budapest for Vienna as the centre of the Habsburg Monarchy. Not less interesting was the famous phrase of Deak : ** Hungary asks no more after Koniggratz than she asked before it." It was a MAGYAR RACIAL POLICY 33 phrase of real statesmanship, based upon long study of Francis Joseph's character — a phrase which a man of small calibre could not have employed, but which came naturally to a statesman who realized that the impracticable and visionary of yesterday had become the practical and real of to-day. If the war was the occasion of the Ausgleich, one of the main determining factors was the circumstance that the Magyars produced, at this critical moment in their history, a group of statesmen of the very front rank. Above all Deak is typical of all that is best and sanest in the Magyar gentry, and may be described without exaggeration as one of the most attractive figures in modern constitutional history. He was a simple unassuming country gentleman, with an un- rivalled knowledge of constitutional law, moderate and tactful, yet unbending and entirely free from the rhetorical gas in which Louis Kossuth so freely indulged. It was above all by his sanity and force of character that he won the respect and confidence of the Crown, and also of the Empress Elizabeth, who became his firm supporter. Side by side with Deak stood Eotvos, the reformer and organizer of Hungarian education, and equally famous as a novelist and writer of political theory, a man of breadth and vision and a liberal in the truest sense of that very equivocal phrase ; and Count Julius Andrassy, who as a young man had been Kossuth's agent in Turkey, and had been con- demned to death in his absence, but who now rallied to the throne of the Habsburgs and supplied to Deak the one quality which he lacked — a diplomatic talent of the highest order, and an intimate knowledge of Europe and the various problems of European policy. Nor was it enough that these men appeared on the Magyar side. Their effectiveness was, in a sense, 3 34 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR doubled by the dearth of statesmen among the Ger- mans of Austria and among the Czechs. In Bohemia especially fatal mistakes were committed, which gave Hungary an advantage to which she was not entitled on historical grounds, and which all the efforts of Czech policy in the next two generations have failed to make good. In a word, the Ausgleich of 1867 was the work of statesmen who knew how to take occasion by the hand, pitted against others to whom this art was a sealed book. Nor must we omit one very important subsidiary cause, namely, the influence of the Saxon statesman Beust, who, as Austrian Chancellor from 1866 to 1870, pursued a policy of "revenge for Koniggratz," and instead of judging the internal affairs of the Monarchy on their merits, regarded the Magyars as a valuable instrument to be exploited against Prussia. The ease with which Count Andrassy pre- vented Beust from rushing to the aid of France and then plucked Francis Joseph from the hands of the momentarily triumphant Federalists, proved Beust's calculations to be mere illusions, and prepared the ground for that rapprochement between Budapest and Berlin which, under the inspiration of Andrassy and Bismarck, became the foundation of the German- Austrian alliance and led slowly but surely to a situa- tion in which the Austrians have become the pliant tools of Prussian and Magyar racial policy. The Ausgleich, then, represents a compact between the Magyars and the Crown, The Germans of Austria were virtually not consulted till afterwards ; the docu- ment which the Austrian parliament was invited to ratify was already an accomplished fact. None of the other races of the Monarchy were consulted at all. It is perfectly possible and even reasonable to argue that the introduction of the Dual system was an evolution, MAGYAR RACIAL POLICY 35 not a revolution ; that it was merely the logical out- come of the Pragmatic Sanction of 1723 and the formal recognition of Hungary's ancient rights and traditions. This is true up to a certain point, but it is not the whole truth. The real motive force of Dualism is a compact between the two strongest races, the Germans in Austria and the Magyars in Hungary, to divide the Monarchy between them. The two next strongest races, the Poles and the Croats, were bought off by special concessions of autonomy, and were thus made accomplices in holding down the remaining eight. It is not my present purpose to dwell upon the constitutional details of this settlement ; and it ought to be unnecessary to remind the reader of the three essential facts : (a) that the two parliaments of Vienna and Budapest are absolutely equal and absolutely dis- tinct ; (/;) that the delegations appointed from them and sitting alternately in each of the two capitals are the only practical link between the two legislatures, and that though in theory joint sessions must be held in cases of disagreement, in practice the two have never met jointly since their creation ; (c) that the three Joint Ministries of Foreign Affairs, War, and Finance are responsible to these somewhat inefficient delega- tions, and not at all to the cabinets and parliaments of Vienna and Budapest. Since 1867, then, Austria has had absolutely no word in the internal affairs of Hungary. There the Hungarian parliament is supreme. The vital differ- ence between the two legislatures is, that while in the Reichsrat all the nationalities of Austria have, despite certain inequalities, always enjoyed fairly adequate representation, in the Hungarian Chamber it has from the first been possible to maintain a close monopoly in favour of a single race — the Magyars. For over a 36 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR generation past the latter has consisted of 413 deputies, exckisive of the 40 delegates from Croatia-Slavonia. Throughout that period the Saxons of Transylvania, who numbered only about 200,000 in all, have been allowed to retain 12 seats from the days of the unreformed franchise, because their weakness forced them into unwilling submission to the Government. But the remainder of the non-Magyars, forming over half the population of Hungary, has been almost un- represented. Except in the parliament of 1906-10, when they secured 25 seats, they have never once exceeded 10, though on a pure basis of population they would be entitled to 198. The internal policy which has dominated the ruling classes of Hungary since 1867 may be summed up in one word — " Magyarization." It has been openly proclaimed and pursued by every leading Hungarian statesman since the death of Deak in 1876 ; but even before then it was in no way a new policy, for in the forties of last century it was already being pursued as ruthlessly as in the first decade of the twentieth century. In order to realize this, it is only necessary to study the files of the Magyar Press of that period, or of the Augsburger Allgcmeine Zeitung, which in those days had a wider circulation than any other newspaper throughout all the countries watered by the Danube, and which devoted special attention to the racial problems of South-eastern Europe. The attempt to enforce a policy of " Magyarization " was made practical by the Ausgleich and by the mass of legislation which accompanied and followed it. Croatia preserved her autonomy under a special Hungaro-Croatian Compromise (1868) ; the Magyar racial position towards the Croats and its effects upon the world war will be dealt with in a later chapter. MAGYAR RACIAL POLICY 37 The union of Transylvania with Hungary, which was due to a manipulation of the franchise and to the grossest possible pressure and mob violence, placed the Roumanian and Saxon at the mercy of the Magyar. But it was above all the Law of Nationalities (1868) which was intended to regulate the future relations of the Magyar and their subject races. In describing the law as fundamental, I do not wish to expose myself to the favourite Magyar legal quibble, which denies the existence of fundamental laws in Hungary. That is as true as the undoubted fact that Magna Charta and Habeas Corpus are not fundamental laws in England ; in using the term I merely wish to indicate that the Law of Nationalities affects the life of modern Hun- gary as deeply as did the Great Charter the life of England seven centuries ago. Before the war Magyar statesmen often advanced the arrogant claim that " nowhere in the world is there so much freedom as in Hungary." The best answer to this grossly misleading claim is a com- parison between the theory and practice of the Law of Nationalities. In order to prove Magyar racial tyranny up to the hilt, it is not necessary to rely upon the statements of its victims ; it is sufficient to restrict the investigation to five points — the Hungarian Statute Book, official Hungarian statistics, the official minutes of the Hungarian parliament, the files of the Magyar jingo Press, and the public utterances of all the leading Hungarian statesmen of the past fifty years. The Law of Nationalities was above all the work of Deak and Eotvos, and it is right to point that they, unlike their successors, intended it to be carried out. They were entirely at one with Coloman Tisza in regarding assimilation as the ideal solution of the racial problem ; but they differed from him radically 38 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR in their choice of methods. They held that a poHcy of mildness and concession would prove more effica- cious than restrictive methods, and that Magyar culture, if it was to prove equal to the task of assimila- tion, could only conquer in virtue of its innate superiority and moral force. On these grounds they refused to recognize the nationalities as separate enti- ties within the state, but designed a law which should make it possible for every race to develop its own language and culture without let or hindrance. Un- happily the intolerance of Tisza and the " Liberal " party prevented its execution, and party exigencies have ever since rendered the Government less and less inclined to make concessions to the Nationalities. Almost from the very first it has remained a dead letter, its various provisions being treated by the authorities as wholly irreconcilable with the principles laid down in the preamble. Like so many other laws on the statute book of Hungary, it is vitiated by em- ploying in the original only a single word (magyar) for two essentially different conceptions — Hungarian, the wide geographical term embracing the whole ter- ritory of St. Stephen ; and Magyar, the narrow racial term, applicable only to one out of the many nationalities of the country. The ambiguity of the phrase becomes apparent when "the political unity of a niagyar nemzet (the Hungarian nation)" is under discussion ; for attempts have consistently been made by historian, politician, and journalist alike to confuse the issue by defining "a magyar nemzet" as "az ural- kodo nemzet," in other words as " the ruling race," not as "the Hungarian nation." The opening clauses of the Law of Nationalities reaffirm the position of the Magyar language as the official language of parliament, the Government, the MAGYAR RACIAL POLICY 39 administration, the County Assemblies, the Courts and the Universities ; and it is hardly necessary to add that these provisions have been scrupulously observed. The remaining clauses have fared very differently. The county and commercial assemblies, which still play so great a part in Hungarian political life, enjoy the right to conduct their proceedings in the mother tongue as well as in Magyar. But this has been evaded by the peculiar franchise, half virilist and only half elective, which has been adopted. A knowledge of the other languages of the district was enjoined upon local officials ; but how far this provision had been enforced may be judged from the circular sent out in December 1907 by Count Andrassy, as Minister of the Interior, to all the county authorities of Hun- gary. In it he insists that " those county officials who in virtue of their position have continual intercourse with the people, shall possess a knowledge of the language of the inhabitants of their district, at least sufficient to converse without hindrance with the people, to understand them and to make their own orders comprehensible to them." The right of every citizen to present petitions or applications in his mother tongue is guaranteed by a later clause ; but the most effective commentary upon it is a speech delivered by the Hungarian Premier, Dr. Wekerle, in June 1906, in which he roundly declared, " I am not in a position to fulfil that provision of the Law of Nationalities, by which the decision is to be given in the same language in which the petition is handed in." In the law courts very definite linguistic rights were secured to the non-Magyar nationalities. But in 1868 the whole judicial system was already under con- sideration, and two years later was completely revised 40 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR by a new law, from which all these rights were bodily omitted, and no effective protest was possible. Since then the proceedings of all Hungarian Courts, whether of first, second, or third instance, are conducted in the Magyar language, and although official interpreters are attached to most of the district courts, they are not provided gratis, but are entitled to demand a daily fee from the parties at law, if their services are employed. It is no exaggeration to say that the non-Magyar peasant stands like an ox before the courts of his native land — though this phrase has on a notorious occasion been treated as " incitement against the Magyar nationality." This charge of incitement of one nationality against another and of "action hostile to the state" or "glorification of a criminal act," belongs to the stock-in-trade of Magyar methods for the persecution of the non-Magyar leaders. Still more glaring examples of Magyar injustice may be drawn from the field of education. In theory, '' all citizens of whatever nationality living together in con- siderable numbers, shall be able in the neighbourhood of their homes to obtain instruction in their mother tongue, up to the point where the highest academic culture begins" (section 17 of Law of Nationalities). How has the pledge been fulfilled ? Every effort, legal and illegal, has been made to Magyarize the educational system, with the result that in all the primary and secondary schools under state control Magyar is the exclusive language of instruction, while the number of denominational schools has been steadily diminished, and their sphere of action, as more favourable to the non-Magyar races, materially restricted. Fifty years ago the Slovaks, who even then numbered over two millions, possessed three gymnasia, which they had founded and maintained by their own MAGYAR RACIAL POLICY 41 exertions. In 1875 all three were arbitrarily closed by order of the Hungarian Government, and since that date the unhappy Slovaks have not been allowed a single secondary school in which their own language is taught, while the number of their primary schools has been reduced from 1,921 in 1869 to 440 in 191 1. While on the basis of population 48 per cent, of the schools should be non-Magyar, in actual fact only 19 per cent, of the elementary schools, yi per cent, of the gymnasia, and 7*8 per cent, of the " Realschulen " are non-Magyar. Since the death of Eotvos the Govern- ment has pursued the deliberate policy of stifling culture and education among the non-Magyars, and concentrating its efforts upon Magyarization. The reactionary provisions of the new educational laws of 1879, 1883, 1891, and 1896 have been eclipsed by the still more notorious legislation of Count Apponyi in 1907, during his tenure of the Ministry of Education. Count Apponyi, who before the war was well known in England and America for his comparison of English and Hungarian constitutional liberties, will go down to history in his own country as the framer of laws which violated all the most elementary rules of hberty and pedagogy, by restricting the sacred rights of the mother tongue and by imposing upon the teachers willy-nilly a thankless and impossible task. It is, of course, the deliberate aim of the Magyar to prevent as far as possible the growth of a middle-class among the nationalities. It is quite a common thing for school- boys to be persecuted or even expelled for showing Slovak proclivities, or even talking their mother tongue "ostentatiously" on the street. As recently as 1914 a brilliant young Slovak student, known to me person- ally, was deprived by the Magyar authorities of a scholarship in Oriental languages, for no other reason 42 GERMAN, SLAY, AND MAGYAR than that he was "untrustworthy in a national sense."^ Such instances are even more frequent among the Roumanians of Hungary. A specially notorious case occurred in March 19 12 at Grosswardein, when sixteen Roumanian theological students were expelled from the Uniate Catholic seminary for the " demonstrative use" of their language, which was regarded as offensive by their fellow-students and professors. Linguistic restrictions are carried to outrageous lengths. There is not a single inscription in any language save Magyar in any post ofBce or railway station throughout Hungary. Slovak medals and stamps produced in America, and bearing such trea- sonable inscriptions as " For our Slovak language " and " I am proud to be a Slovak," have been con- fiscated in Hungary. Only Magyar inscriptions are tolerated on the tombstones of the Budapest ceme- teries. The erection of monuments to Roumanian or Slovak patriots has more than once been prohibited, and the funds collected have been arbitrarily seized and applied to Magyar purposes. In 1892 a typical incident occurred in the country churchyard of Hluboka, beside the grave of the Lutheran pastor, J. M. Hurban, the leader of the Slovak bands in 1848. The peasantry had flocked from far and near to witness the unveiling of his tombstone, but before the ceremony could commence, gendarmes appeared and dispersed the crowd at the point of the bayonet. The dead man's son, Mr. Svetozar Hurban, the well- known Slovak poet, voiced his indignation in a violent article entitled " Hyaenism in Hungary," and was sen- tenced to a year's imprisonment for this unpardonable offence. A somewhat similar scene occurred in August 1910, when three Slovak Lutheran pastors, two retired ' This document is in my possession. MAGYAR RACIAL POLICY 43 schoolmasters, a retired notary aged 77, and a promi- nent advocate, were fined by the local authorities for holding a service round the grave of the well-known Slovak patriot and musician Fajnor, singing hymns and delivering an address without notifying the police. Here again the crowd was brutally dispersed by gendarmes. National colours other than the Magyar are strictly forbidden. Four years ago, at the funeral of a Roumanian poet at Kronstadt (Transylvania), gendarmes pressed up to the hearse and clipped off the colours from a wreath which had been sent by the Society of Journalists in Bucarest. About the same time a nurse was sent to prison because a child of three was found wearing a Roumanian tricolor bow, and its parents were reprimanded and fined. In July 19 14, on the very eve of war, fifteen theological students, returning to Bucarest from an excursion into Transylvania, were arrested at the frontier by Hungarian gendarmes, hauled by main force out of the train, sent back to Hermannstadt, and kept for days in gaol ; their offence consisted in waving some Roumanian tricolors from the train windows as they steamed out of the last station in Hungary ! No law of association exists in Hungary, and the Government uses its arbitrary powers to prohibit or suppress even such harmless organizations as temper- ance societies, choral unions, or women's leagues. Perhaps the most notorious examples are the disso- lution 06 the Slovak Academy in 1875, and of the Roumanian National Party in 1894, as an illegal organization. But the treatment meted out to trades unions and working-class organizations, both Magyar and non-Magyar, for years past has been equally scandalous. The right of assembly is no less pre- carious in a country where parliamentary candidates U GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR are arrested or expelled from their constituencies, where deputies are prevented from addressing their constituents, and where an electoral address is often treated as a penal offence. As for the Hungarian electoral system, the less said the better. Gerrymandering, a narrow and compli- cated franchise, bribery and corruption on a gigantic scale, the wholesale use of troops and gendarmes to prevent opposition voters from reaching the polls, the cooking of electoral rolls, illegal disqualifications, sham counts, official terrorism, and in many cases actual bloodshed — such are but a few of the methods which preserve a political monopoly in the hands of a corrupt and increasingly inefficient racial oligarchy, in a country where the absence of the ballot places the peasant peculiarly at the mercy of the authorities.^ Many pages could be filled with the repressive methods adopted towards the non-Magyar Press of Hungary with the deliberate object of reducing it to silence or bankruptcy. It is sufficient to mention that between April 1906 and August 1908 sentences were passed on non-Magyars for press offences amounting to a total of 181 years 3 months' imprisonment and fines of 99,000 crowns.^ Whole books might be written to illustrate the contention that in matters of education, administra- tion and justice, association and assembly, the franchise and the Press, the non-Magyar nationalities of Hungary have long been the victims of a policy of repression which is without any parallel in civilized ' For full details of this iniquitous system see my " Corruption and Reform in Hungary: a Study of Electoral Practice," 1911, still further enlarged in a German edition of the following year. ' For full details see chapters xv and xvi of my " Racial Problems in Hungary." MAGYAR RACIAL POLICY 45 Europe. This policy is based upon the pecuHar psychology which made a prominent Magyar deputy, not many years ago, declare that "the Magyar is destined to be the first nation of the world." It was this form of megalomania which made a Magyar publicist in 1908 write as follows : " Our nationalities can never substitute any other culture for the Magyar ; for a special Serb, Roumanian, or Slovak culture does not and cannot exist." And lest this should be regarded as the outburst of some crazy fanatic, it may be well to quote the phrase of Coloman Tisza, who in 1875 declared, on the floor of the House, that "there is no Slovak nation." In so speaking he was merely imitating the attitude of Louis Kossuth, who on the eve of 1848 professed himself unable to find Croatia on the map. Another and far more moderate Hungarian Premier, Coloman Szell, speaking at a banquet in June 1908, did not hesitate to declare that " this country must first be preserved as a Magyar country, and then it must be cultured, rich, enlightened, and progressive." As yet another Hungarian premier. Baron Banffy, declared in parliament, amid the applause of the majority, "The legal State is the aim : but with this question we can only con- cern ourselves when we have already assured the national State. . . . Hungarian interests demand its erection on the most extreme Chauvinist lines." The present Premier, Count Stephen Tisza, on the eve of the elections of 1905 publicly defined his attitude to the other races as follows : "A cardinal condition for the enjoyment of rights by other nationalities is that the citizens of other nationalities should recognize unreservedly that this State is the Magyar State. . . . The Magyar nation has never given a binding promise to maintain the Law of Nationalities for all time, or 46 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR not to alter it . . . when conditions alter, and when we perceive that through this law we grant to our opponents rights against ourselves." In 1910 he declared with equal publicity that with national parties he would never make compromises: "for in the moment when our Roumanian fellow-citizens form parties on the basis of nationality, they are already denying the political unity of the Magyar nation. . . . With this shade of opinion there can be no negotia- tion : it must be fought, and if we conquer we must destroy it." It is upon this basis that Count Tisza and his compatriots are fighting the present war, and war was the logical outcome of such political tenets. The race which could introduce into its national songs the phrase "the God of the Magyars" (a magyarok Istene) is a natural ally of William II, whose blas- phemous patronage of the Almighty has been one of the most disgusting incidents of the war. Wholesale racial tyranny represents the ideal of the Central Powers, and it is no accident that the Prussian, the Magyar, and the Turk are linked together against us. Above all the Magyar system, from which I have lifted but a corner of the veil, is one of the mainsprings of the present war ; and its revival, whether in Hungary, in Russia, in German Poland, or in any other European country, must be made finally impossible, if there is to be a new and healthy Europe in the future. There are still many people in this country who are sceptical as to the importance of this problem, and who look upon Belgium and Serbia as two watertight compartments, having as little connection with each other morally as geographically. They forget that the programme of nationality and the right of small nations to control their own destiny — the programme MAGYAR RACIAL POLICY 47 upon which the Entente rests its war policy — if it means anything at all, involves the emancipation of the Slav nations of Austria-Hungary and their detach- ment from German control. They forget, too, that the Germans, while we talk about our moral commit- ments, are actually forging in the most practical of all forms that geographical link which is to bind both Belgium and Serbia to the chariot-wheels of the new Germany — the new Central-European Zollverein (Mitteleuropa) of 150,000,000 inhabitants, for whose creation William II and his partisans are working. If we are not prepared to carry out our programme to the bitter end, then let us at least face the hard facts of the situation ; let us realize that the age of iron and of steel, of armaments and bankruptcy and revolution, is at our doors, and that idealism and honour are to be banished from the world. So long as only the non-Magyars of Hungary suffered from the infamies to which I have all too briefly alluded, it was possible to argue that the problem was one of purely internal politics, and the ",man in the street " in Western Europe might be excused for regarding it with indifference. But one of these races, the Serbs, and their Croat kinsmen, enjoyed a special position of their own, and could not be ground utterly into the dust like the unhappy Slovaks and Roumanians, This fact reacted upon the whole relations of the Monarchy with Serbia, made of the Southern Slav Question a problem of foreign policy, and in due course brought its very important quota to the causes of the Great War. CHAPTER IV THE GENESIS OF SERBIA It is difficult to imagine a greater contrast than that between the two unequal neighbours, the powerful Austro-Hungarian Monarchy with its 51,000,000 inhabitants, its complex political structure, and its ancient traditions of culture, and the little peasant state of Serbia, arising by its own efficiency from the ruins of a distant past and handicapped by every conceivable political and geographical disadvantage. An American writer recently said that one of the achievements of this war had been to prove that Belgium is not a mere road but a nation. Many people looked upon Belgium as an amorphous, soul- less mass of mixed nationality, sunk in luxury and materialism, and suddenly she arose in all her heroism and proved herself worthy of a great past ; nay, more, her national spirit found inspired expression in the only great poets whom Providence has vouchsafed to this age of iron. The American phrase would apply with equal force to Serbia ; and there is a further parallel in the fact that the Serbo-Croat race, so recently despised as savage and uncultured, has pro- duced the greatest sculptor of modern times in the Dalmatian shepherd boy Ivan Mestrovic, the true prophet in stone of the Southern Slav idea. But 4S THE GENESIS OF SERBIA 49 the attitude of the " man in the street " to Serbia has been the very reverse of his attitude to Belgium. Even the most ignorant knows that Serbia is a nation ; but if men in authority had realized in due time that Serbia is a Road, we might have been spared one of the most humiliating episodes in the whole history of the war. There are two vital facts about Serbia. In the first place Serbia is the route to the East, the last land obstacle to the German Drang nach Osien, to the programme of " Berlin to Bagdad," which before the war was secretly brooded over, and only proclaimed by Pan-German pamphleteers, but which to-day is openly preached by the leading political writers and journalists of Germany.^ Just as in the Middle Ages Serbia lay across the path of the Turkish conquerors moving westwards, so last autumn she blocked the path of the German conquerors moving eastwards. Had Belgium not blocked the road between Germany and Calais, her territory might be immune to-day ; Holland is the living proof of this argument. In the same way Serbia might have escaped if she occupied the geographical position of Roumania. Moreover, to those who knew Vienna it has been an open secret for at least six years past, that the Austrian General Staff regarded the line of the Morava as the strategic line of advance towards their ultimate goal, Salonica. That is one of the inner explanations of Count Aehren- thal's abandonment in 1908 of tlie alternative route ' A passing reference may be made to a recent German pamphlet by Miiller-Holm, who, while arguing that freedom is to be wrested from Russia for Poland, Finland, the Ukraine, and so forth, takes for granted a complete absorption of Serbia, the destruction of her freedom and her inclusion in the " Mitteleuropa" of which Liszt, Friedrich Naumann, and other distinguished Germans dream and write. 4 50 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR across the Sandjak of Novibazar, which Austrian troops had garrisoned for thirty years. The second vital fact is the movement for Southern Slav national liberty which underlies all the varying phases of the conflict of the last ten years between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, but which for the last eighteen months has been the real inspiration of Serbia's heroic resistance to the Central Powers. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that those who regard the Southern Slav problem merely as a diplo- matic 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 ; it must be treated as a whole, of which Serbia is only a part. The other half of the problem is supplied by the 7,000,000 Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes of the Habsburg Monarchy, and its international character is due to the geographical position of the race and the existence of an entirely artificial political frontier. The idea that the problem can be solved, in the event of a victory of the Allies, on a purely Serbian basis, is just as absurd as the idea of many serious persons in Austria-Hungary before the war, including even the late Archduke Francis Ferdinand himself, that it could be solved on a purely Croat basis. There is only one sure basis for its solu- tion, namely, a "Southern Slav" or "Jugoslav" basis. Any attempt to enforce some other method is fore- doomed to failure, whether it come from Austria or Hungary, from Serbia or Italy, or even from the Allies or Europe as a whole. Any one who in 1859 had tried to solve the problem of Italian national unity on a Piedmontese or a Tuscan, instead of an Italian basis, would have been guilty of the same folly. It was because Cavour identified Piedmont THE GENESIS OF SERBIA 51 with something far greater and allowed it to be merged in Italy, instead of encouraging it in the part of a bullfrog puffing itself to an irrational size, that the foundations which he laid have been so sure and permanent. Events have assured to Serbia the role of a Slavonic Piedmont ; and even to-day it is still permissible to hope that this war may end for Serbia as the wars of 1859 and 1866 ended for Piedmont. For to-day the creation of a united Southern Slav state is as essentially an European and a British interest, as was the creation of United Italy nearly two generations ago. Nowhere is there so clear a case for the principle of Nationality as among the disunited fragments of the Southern Slavs, and if we disregard their claims we throw to the winds our programme of the rights of small nations to an independent existence. But quite apart from our programme or from the need of vindicating our tarnished reputation in the Balkans after the shameful abandonment of October 19 15, we need a strong Southern Slav state on the Eastern Adriatic as a bulwark against German aggression towards the East. Finally, on military grounds our aid is amply justified by the fact that Serbia is the route westward as well as the route eastward, the point of departure from which it is possible to attack Germany at her weakest, instead of her strongest, point. Of all the nations of the Balkan Peninsula, the first among whom national sentiment revived and took a practical form was the Serbian, nor can it be emphasized too strongly that the movement among the Serbs was spontaneous, that its success was due in the main to their heroism and endurance, and that they received far less external help than any of their neighbours. The centre of the movement was the ^umadija, the 52 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR wooded upland district south of the Save which to-day forms the backbone of the Kttle kingdom. But it is well to note at the very outset two peculiar features of Serbian history. Not merely have the frontiers of the Serbian state changed more frequently in the course of the last thousand years than perhaps those of any other European state, but they have never included, and do not even to-day include, the whole of the race ; indeed the fact that they do not is one of the causes of the present war. The two kindred tribes, Serbs and Croats, trace their mythical descent to two brothers, who led their invading hordes in the seventh century into the territory still in the possession of the race. But almost from the first geography acted upon them as a centrifugal force, and shaped their fate into varying channels. The rival cultures of Rome and Byzantium tore them in two opposite directions and moulded their outlook, alike in matters civil and ecclesiastical. The great Slav apostles, Cyril and Methodius, themselves natives of Salonica, were the decisive influence in the conversion of both Serbs and Croats. But their memorable missionary efforts had taken place at a period when the Eastern and Western Churches were once more in communion. When the conflict again broke out and this time became final, the w^estern or Croat branch of the race naturally fell under the influence of Rome, while the eastern or Serb branch remained attached to Byzantium, whose powder had very markedly re- vived under the great emperors of the eleventh century. The breach was all the more effectual because the ecclesiastical schism, confirming existing geographical tendencies, coincided roughly with a period when the THE GENESIS OF SERBIA 53 kingdom of Croatia was on the eve of the extinction of its independence, while the young and vigorous kingdom of the Serbs was steadily rising into promi- nence under the guidance of the Nemanja dynasty. The eighth and ninth centuries saw the rise of these two shadowy states, and the scanty fragments which survive in the little museum of Knin (in the hinter- land of Northern Dalmatia) show that the Croatian court at a period contemporaneous with William the Conqueror and Robert Guiscard was not devoid of the first elements of culture. After a brief interlude of glory, in which Zvonimir, the greatest of the Croatian kings, was crowned in Spalato by a legate of Pope Gregory VII (1076), Croatia fell under the sway of the Magyars (1102) ; and although it has always succeeded in preserving an autonomous exist- ence, its fortunes have for the last eight centuries been in the main dependent upon those of Budapest. Mean- while the rise of the Serbian state represents a natural growth from a primitive community, in which the family, in its widest sense, was the unit and the Zadruga or Communal association the superstructure. The power of the elder (or Starjesina) developed into that of the zupan or clan chief ; and an ever-expand- ing group of zupans came to centre round the Great zupan (veliki zupan), whose office, after passing from one great family to another, at length crystallized into an effective overlordship for the Nemanja family. It is essential to remember that the foundation upon which the Serbian state rested, even in its mediaeval form, was the free peasant community. In early centuries the rivalry of the Byzantine and Bulgarian Empires had been successfully exploited by the Serbs to secure relative immunity from attack. From the eleventh century onwards the young Serbia 54 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR had to reckon with the powerful mediaeval kingdom of Hungary, which, stretching out across Croatia, estab- lished a somewhat shadowy and varying claim to Bosnia and portions of Dalmatia, both peopled since the seventh century by a purely Croat and Serb population. The Serbian rulers of the thirteenth century found it necessary to enter upon closer dynastic and political engagements with the Hungarian kings, and even to court the favour of the Papacy and hold out serious hopes of a con- version to Catholicism. Stephen PrvenCani, or the " First-Crowned," whose father Neman j a had ended his days in the garb of an Orthodox monk, allowed himself in 1217 to be crowned by a Papal legate, with the high-sounding titles of " King of Serbia, Diocletia, Travunia, Dalmatia, and Chum." Zealous monkish chroniclers record the story of a second coronation in the year 1222, by which his brother, the Metropolitan Sava, reclaimed him for the Eastern Church ; but modern research rejects this as an invention of religious bigotry. St. Sava, who estab- lished his archiepiscopal see at Uzice — the Serbian Mecca, as Ranke has called it — is the true founder of the Serbian national Church, and one of the greatest figures in the history of the nation. His influence effectively checked the overtures made by the Papacy to the Serbian king, and finally identified the cause of the national Church with Constanti- nople rather than Rome. The twelfth and thirteen centuries represent the golden era of the Serbian national state. After steadily gaining strength under a series of able rulers, it reached its zenith in the twenty years' reign of Stephen Dusan (1331-55). Those who may distrust the natural enthusiasm of Serbian historians THE GENESIS OF SERBIA 55 will find ample evidence of his military power and governing capacity in contemporary Greek chronicles. His court became a centre of dawning art and litera- ture ; the southern districts of the present kingdom of Serbia are studded with remarkable examples of Serbian ecclesiastical architecture,^ due for the most [part to the munificence of Dusan and his father : and from the battered fragments of fresco and mosaic which have survived four centuries of Turkish barbarism, it is easy to trace the influence of those Italian artists who were welcomed to the Balkans when the Sienese and Florentine schools were still in their infancy. The rich mines of mediaeval Serbia were exploited by the merchants of the Ragusan Republic, and formed a growing com- mercial link with Italy. Above all Dusan's famous code reveals the fact that law and administration were already passing from the primitive stage and giving promise of a new culture. In the thirteen campaigns which he waged against Byzantium, he reduced the greater part of the modern Macedonia, Albania, and Montenegro to his sway, and penetrated as far as the Gulf of Corinth on the south, the Bocche di Cattaro on the west, and almost to the gates of Adrianople on the east. Belgrade and its territory were wrested from Hungary, and Bosnia reduced to the condition of a vassal state (1350). In 1348 he had assumed the title of " Tsar of the Serbs and Greeks," and wore the tiara and other Imperial insignia. The crown of the East was his acknowledged aim, and preparations for the conquest of Constantinople were ' Notably the beautiful marble churches of Decani (near Ipek) and Studenica, and those of GraCanica and Ravanica, both equally famous in Serbian ballad poetry. 56 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR made upon the most formidable scale. His armies were already in sight of the Bosphorus, when the great Dusan succumbed to a sudden illness, which suspicious contemporaries ascribed to poison, but which the more sober historians of our own day attribute to natural causes.^ Unhappily Du§an's greatness died with him, and his loosely knit dominions became the prey of warring feudal lords and soon dissolved into their component parts. Only a generation later on, June 28, 1389, Lazar, the last of the Serbian Tsars, and with him the Serbian Empire, perished in the great battle of Kosovo, the fatal Field of the Blackbirds, which lives in countless national ballads of equal beauty and originality, and keeps the memory of ancient glories aflame even to-day throughout the entire peasantry, not merely of Serbia and Monte- negro, but also of kindred Croatia, Bosnia, and Dal- matia. The victorious Turkish Sultan Murad II shared the fate of his rival Lazar, and was buried on the field of battle. But Serbia fell rapidly under Turkish vassalage, and in 1459 her conquest was completed by the redoubtable Mohammed II. Finally in 1463, the Serb princes of Bosnia were also reduced to subjection ; their last despairing effort to secure Western aid by the adoption of Catholicism drove the population. Orthodox ad- herents of Byzantium and heretic Bogomil sectaries alike, to welcome the rule of Islam rather than that of the Roman Cardinal whom the dynasty were pre- pared to welcome. In Bosnia the nobility saved their lands by apostasy from the Christian faith, and for long intervals of time remained virtually undis- » JireCek {Gesch. der Serben, p. 412) does not even refer to the rumour. THE GENESIS OF SERBIA 57 turbed by their new rulers. But in Serbia no such local concessions were possible. The nobility ceased to exist, and the valleys of the Morava and Vardar, like that of the Marica farther east, had to submit to the Turkish system in all its severity. Just as to-day Serbia is coveted by the Central Powers as a route to the East, the key to the possession of Salonica and Constantinople, so for centuries she was held in the brutal grasp of successive Turkish conquerors as the route to the West. For the success of their almost annual campaign in Hungary, the utter subjection of the Serb and Bulgar countries was an essential preliminary. In short, the real cause of their national extinction lies not in any racial inferiority, but in their unfavourable geographical position, which assigned to them the front rank in the defence of Christendom against the inroads of the Crescent. In the words of a French historian, " they were the victims of a tragic calamity analogous to that which in 1914 condemned Belgium to atrocious devastation." From 1463 to 1804 the national life of the Serbs lay utterly crushed. The rayah, the enslaved Christian peasant, was exploited by heavy taxation, cowed by restrictions, and above all by the horrible child-tribute to which the renowned corps of the Janissaries so long owed its recruits. The relations between conqueror and conquered are best characterized 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. Two things alone kept alive the Serb tradition — the splendid popular ballads, unsurpassed in Europe for directness and imagination, and the stubborn spirit of the Orthodox clergy, who, amid ignorance, neglect and oppression, remained the repositories of the nation's conscience. Only at two 58 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR points did the flame of liberty continue to burn — in the tiny mountain eyrie of Montenegro and in the maritime Republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik). The history of the Black Mountain (Crnagora) is in many respects the most romantic in all the chequered annals of the Peninsula. Its barren rocks and precipices became a rallying-place for the Serb survivors from the fatal carnage of Kosovo ; and under Ivo Crnojevic, renowned in many an ancient ballad as Ivo the Black or Ivo Beg, this remnant of a warlike nation defended itself desperately against all comers. Ivo's descendants proved unworthy of him, and the little country was reduced during the seven- teenth century to pay occasional tribute to the Sultan and even to provide fighting men for the Turkish service. But the spirit of ^the mountaineers was never wholly broken, and on Christmas Eve 1702, at the instance of their Vladika or Bishop, they rose and massacred every Turk within their reach. This ferocious incident lives in history as the Slavonic version of the Sicilian Vespers ; from it dates the final independence of the Black Mountain. The Vladika Danilo, of the family of Petrovid-Njegos, became the founder of the dynasty which still occupies the throne ; the succession passed from uncle to nephew, until a second Danilo, the uncle of King Nicholas, separated the princely from the priestly calling and placed the dynasty on a purely secular footing. With the exception of the Turks and the Venetians, Europe had hitherto been ignorant of the very existence of Montenegro. But the exploits of Danilo found an echo in distant Russia. When war broke out in 17 10 between Russia and Turkey, a certain Vladisavid, a Herzegovinian Serb in the Russian THE GENESIS OF SERBIA 59 service, proposed to Peter the Great that an attempt should be made to raise Herzegovina and Monte- negro against the Turks. Another Serb soldier of fortune in Russia was accordingly sent to Danilo, with a proclamation of Peter, couched in grandilo- quent terms, denouncing the alliance between the " barbarous Turks and the heretic king of Sweden " against Russia, and proclaiming the lively concern of the Tsar for " the Slav nation " and his determination "to liberate the oppressed Orthodox Christians from the yoke of the infidel." ^ The proclamation pro- duced a deep impression upon the Montenegrins, and this was but the first of many occasions on which the influence of Petrograd [goaded them into action against the Turks. It became a tradition among the Vladikas to visit Russia, and so implicit and unreason- ing was the faith of the mountaineers in their distant kinsmen, that in 1768 an impostor, known to history as Stephen the Little, was able for a time to usurp the government of the Black Mountain by posing as the murdered Tsar of Russia, Peter III. The renewed outbreak of hostilities between Russia and Turkey in the same year induced Catherine II in her turn to prepare a manifesto " to all Christian communities of the Greek and Slav Orthodox nation, our co-religionists of the Holy Eastern Church," inviting their aid if they wished to " shake off the oppressive yoke of the infidels." ^ Subsequent events, however, showed that Russian policy as yet regarded these peoples as con- venient pawns in a game of which Constantinople and Santa Sofia were to be the reward. Very different was the development of Montenegro's near neighbour, the republic of Dubrovnik, better ' Milakovie, "Storia del Montencro," p. 88. ■ Ibid., pp. 124-7. 60 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR known by its Italian name of Ragusa. Originally founded by Roman refugees from the neighbouring town of Epidaurum, it acquired a Slavonic character as early as the seventh century, and has throughout its history played a unique part as interpreter between the Latin and Slavonic worlds. Save for a century and a half of Venetian rule (1205-1358) the little town continued to defend its independence against all comers, and acquired a commercial position of first importance throughout the Levant. In the fourteenth century the republic had special trading centres in Sarajevo, Skoplje, Belgrade, Sofia, Vidin, Bucarest, and Adrianople, and leased three Serbian gold mines for an annual rent of 300,000 ducats, which, according to the calculations of Sir Arthur Evans, amounted to half the total revenue of Queen Elizabeth two centuries later. As an example of the enlightened policy of the Ragusans may be cited a decree issued by the Grand Council in 1416, by which all traffic in slaves was forbidden to citizens of the republic. Ragusan territory became an important centre of the shipbuilding trade, and the "argosies" which figure in the poetry of the Elizabethan era derive their name from that of Ragusa. Ragusan galleys took part in the battle of Lepanto and shared the disasters of the Spanish Armada. The republic reached its zenith in the early sixteenth century, when Ivan Gundulic formed the centre of a brilliant group of poets and dramatists and laid the foundations of Serbo- Croat as a modern literary language. The great earthquake of 1667 ushered in a period of decline ; but when at last Ragusan independence was destroyed by Napoleon in 1808, the national spirit was once more awake among the Serbs. Dubrovnik, so long the solitary torch-bearer of Southern Slav culture, THE GENESIS OF SERBIA 61 sank exhausted under the rule of the Habsburgs (1814), to await in fitful slumber the hour of national resurrection. Montenegro and Ragusa were but faint and isolated beacons amid the deep gloom of the Turkish era. Meanwhile the great mass of the Serbian race, to whom Russia was still unknown, naturally turned with eyes of hope towards the north. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century the world, so far as the ignorant Serb peasant was concerned, fell into two halves — Carska Zemlja, the land of the Tsar or Emperor (in other words Turkey, for in every Slav tongue Constantinople is Tsarigrad, the city of the Tsar), I and Cesarija Zemlja, Austria, the land of the Caisar in Vienna. Even as early as the fifteenth century many Serbs, flying from Turkish rule, had settled in the southern plains of Hungary and along the banks of the Danube, as far north as Budapest. After the defeat of Mohacs and the Turkish conquest of Central Hungary, these Serb settlers shared the fate of their Magyar neighbours in the Alfold, and depopulation and ruin was the fate of some of the most fertile provinces in all Europe. In the first period of chaos which succeeded Mohacs, the territory between the Drave and the Save was guarded by an army supported by the Styrian Estates, while the districts lying between the river Kulpa and the Adriatic were left to the care of the Estates of Carniola. In the course of time a special province, subject to the direct authority of the Emperor, was formed under the title of "The Militarv Frontiers" (Vojna Krajina). It was divided into iwo "general- ates," the Slavonian and the Croatian, organized and ' Hence the title " Tsar " invariably applied to the Sultan in the old Serb ballads. 62 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR governed on a purely military basis. Every Granidlar or Frontiersman vjas liable to military service from his eighteenth year, and must at all times be ready to bear arms against the invader ; but in return for this duty successive emperors granted substantial privileges, and the Granicari were justly famous not only for their military prowess, but also for their sturdy in- dependence of character. Every commune elected its head, and all the communes of a capitanate their joint judge, the election in each case requiring the sanction of the commanding officer. The Orthodox Church enjoyed the same privileges as Catholicism, in striking contrast to the more northerly countries. In the course of time the Military Frontiers were both modified and extended, and there grew up a race of hereditary soldiers and officers, holding their land on a military tenure but otherwise organized on strictly democratic lines and inspired by a tradition of personal devotion to the Imperial idea, such as not even the long chain of errors and crimes committed by Vienna and Budapest in their recent dealings with the Southern Slavs have wholly availed to efface. Towards the close of the seventeenth century the tide turned very definitely in favour of the Christians. In 1686 the Turks were expelled from Buda, where a Pasha had ruled for one hundred and sixty years ; and during the next twenty-five years the armies of the Duke of Lorraine, Stahremberg, Louis of Baden and, above all. Prince Eugene, reclaimed Central Hungary and even large tracts of Serbia itself. It was under the impression of the earlier of these splendid victories that the chief Serbian exodus into the Habsburg dominions took place. In 1690 the Patriarch of Ipek, Arsen Crnojevi(5, with many thousand Serb families, migrated to Hun- THE GENESIS OF SERBIA 63 gary and Slavonia, on the direct invitation of the Emperor Leopold himself, and occupied some of the territory which Turkish rule had reduced to desola- tion. The Imperial charters of 1690 and 1691 assured to Leopold's new subjects their full recognition as a nation, the free exercise of their religion, national customs and church calendar, and the right to elect their patriarch and voivode and to control their own administration. These privileges were repeatedly confirmed, but Jesuit influences at court and the hostility of the Hungarian Estates combined to pre- vent their due execution. The consequent discontent provoked a rising in 1735, which led to a further curtailment of Serb rights and to the re-emigration of large numbers of the settlers to the South of Russia, where they have long since become merged in the surrounding population. None the less, large numbers remained behind and flourished exceedingly. As we have seen, the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699) secured for the Emperor the formal right to intervene on behalf of the Balkan Christians, who in their turn looked more and more to Vienna for their political salvation. The treaty of Pozarevac (1718), which crowned the victorious campaigns of Prince Eugene, not merely expelled the Turks from their last foothold on Hungarian soil, but secured the fortress of Bel- grade, Northern Serbia and Western Wallachia for Austria. This seemed to render Austria's complete absorption of Serbia and Bosnia a mere matter of time. But the fatal dual tendency which has so often paralysed Austria's action — the sure outcome of her geographical position between east and west — pre- vented a fulfilment of the designs which some of her statesmen harboured. In the Balkans Austria had a start of several generations over any of her rivals, 64 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR but she failed to use it, and her history is a record of wasted opportunities. The successors of Prince Eugene proved incompetent to defend his conquests, and the ignominious Peace of Belgrade (1739) restored Serbia and Wallachia to the Turks. The Austrian occupation left many memories among the Serbs, whose intercourse with their kinsmen on Habsburg territory it had strengthened. But it was followed by nearly fifty years of negative policy in the Balkans. Throughout that period the whole attention of Maria Theresa and her advisers was concentrated upon the long struggle against Frederick the Great, and all their surplus energy was devoted to that elaborate series of administrative reforms by which the survival and evolution of modern Austria was rendered possible. Catherine the Great's first war against Turkey was undertaken without Austrian co-operation, and Maria Theresa was a reluctant accomplice in the partition of Poland. But her son Joseph II, despite his preoccupation with agrarian, linguistic and ecclesiastical innovations, fell more and more under the spell of Balkan adventure. In com- bination with Catherine II, he worked out an ambi- tious scheme for the partition of the Ottoman Empire, and in the pursuit of this aim Laudon succeeded in planting for a brief period the imperial standard on the citadel of Belgrade (1789). But the death of Joseph transformed the situation. Leopold II was more concerned for the fate of the Netherlands, his relations with Prussia were extremely difficult, and the growing complications and unrest of the French revolution paralysed his Balkan policy. When peace came, Belgrade was restored once more to the Turks, and the Serbs were left to their own resources. The joint action of Austria and Russia against the THE GENESIS OF SERBIA 65 Turks had aroused great expectations in Serbia, and when the war ended in a virtual restoration of the status quo, the disillusionment and bitterness were unbounded. A very characteristic outburst was that of the Serbian leader Aleksa Nenadovic, who roundly declared, "The Emperor has deserted me and the whole Serbian nation, just as his ancestors deserted ours. I will go from cloister to cloister, and bid every monk and priest take note of it, so that in future no single Serb may ever believe the Germans." National feeling had been so thoroughly aroused, that the Turks, when taking over one of the fortresses evacuated by the Austrians, called out to the latter, " Neighbours, what have you done with our rayahs ? " Henceforth the Serbs relied upon themselves, and happily fortune, in teaching them the bitter lesson of self-reliance, also provided them with peasant leaders of real genius. The insubordination of the Janissaries, which already seriously menaced the Sultan's power, was especially flagrant in the distant province of Belgrade ; and their arrogance and depredations, culminating in 1804 in the massacre of a number of Serbian notables, provoked a serious insurrection. George Petrovid, better known as Black or " Kara " George, was the son of a prosperous peasant in the central, or Sumadija, district of Serbia, following the national profession of pig-breeding. He was a man of commanding figure, indomitable resolve and fierce passions, ignorant and even barbaric as the world counts wisdom, but endowed with those qualities of leadership — personal magnetism, torrential bravery and diplomatic skill — which in times of crisis are needed to rally a nation behind an individual. Among the first leaders of revolt there was no idea of asserting independence : their only 5 66 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR desire was to shake off the oppressive rule of the Dahis and to secure from the Sultan the sure guarantee of local privileges. It is, however, well to note the part played by the Orthodox clergy in the movement for liberty : not content with merely encouraging their flocks, many of them were foremost in the ranks of the combatants. In the whole career of Kara George, Kati6, Jakob Nenadovid, Luka Lazarevic and others of their comrades, it is easy to trace something of the spirit with which the peasant bards of Serbia have for centuries past clothed their national heroes. Under Kara George as supreme chief " every tree became a soldier " ; the flower of the Turkish army was more than once defeated by the Serbs, and Belgrade fell into their hands. A first primitive senate was formed, and the rudiments of an administrative and educational system were intro- duced. But after a heroic resistance of nine years there followed a sudden collapse, accentuated by internal dissensions among the Serbian chiefs and by the complications to which foreign, and especially Russian, interference gave rise. Turkish rule was restored, and Kara George was forced to take refuge on Austrian territory. The liberation of Serbia was to be completed by a rival leader, Milos Obrenovic, a man of equal energy and superior statecraft, and unquestionably one of the most remarkable rulers of his age. On Palm Sunday, 1815, Milos unfurled anew the standard of revolt, and speedily won the entire country to his side. Within two years he was the undisputed ruler of Serbia, was proclaimed as " supreme prince " (Vrhovni Knez), and found himself free to organize the administration on purely national lines. Un- happily his triumph was stained by the treacherous THE GENESIS OF SERBIA 67 murder of his rival Kara George, whose head was dispatched as a hideous trophy to placate the Sublime Porte (1817). Thus originated the fatal dynastic feud between the Obrenovid and Karagjorgjevic families, which has embittered modern Serbian history and done so much to retard the country's progress. It was not till 1830 that the Sultan could be induced to recognize Milo§ as prince. But despite the un- certainty of the preceding decade the growth of Serbian independence was sure and steady. None the less the need of a strong military organization was so obviously the sole means of maintaining the liberties which they had won, that the Knezes, or district leaders, were very soon compelled to submit to the personal domination of a single man. Milos made the most of his double position, as the acknowledged chief of the nation and as the accredited repre- sentative of the Porte. He soon came to disregard the advice and complaints even of his most influential followers. While concentrating all ad- ministrative and judicial power in the "supreme national court," which continued the traditions of Kara George's short-lived Senate, he at first insisted " upon its following him whenever he changed his residence, and reserved to himself the right of pronouncing the death sentence. Milos was a truly patriarchal ruler, such as is only possible in a primitive form of society ; while his wife, the Princess Ljubica, cooked for him as Penelope may have cooked for Odysseus, kept order in his semi- Oriental establishment, and occasionally resorted to very drastic measures to rid herself of rivals in her husband's graces. In private intercourse Milos treated the Knezes as his equals, but unhesitatingly declined to accept their control in public affaire. 68 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR "Am I the master," he would exclaim (using the word " Gospodar," by which he was most widely known to his countrymen), " and shall I not be at liberty to do as I please ? " After the advent of the Orleans dynasty in France, he was even heard to declare that Charles X would never have lost his throne had he understood how to govern, as he himself did in Serbia.^ Unhappily his uncontrol- lable temper and greed of money led to many scandalous abuses, the most notorious Of all being his control of the salt monopoly and of certain articles of export. By degrees his autocratic lean- ings caused general discontent and estrangement, and in 1835 he saw himself forced to introduce a constitution and to allow the Skupstina or popular assembly to meet and express itself. The interference of foreign powers in the internal affairs of Serbia began to gain in strength, and by a curious irony Britain and France, whose consuls were very active at this period in Belgrade and Kragujevac, favoured the extension of the prince's absolutist powers, while autocratic Russia contended for a restriction of his authority.2 The numerous restrictions which the charter of 1838 imposed upon the prince proved intolerable to Milos, and led inevitably and rapidly to his abdication and exile (1839). -^ month later his eldest son Milan succumbed to a protracted illness without ever having been able to assume office, and was succeeded by his younger brother Michael. But the politicians who had engineered the movement against the father did not feel secure with the son as their ruler, and having secured the approval of the Porte for their plans, started a military revolt which ' Ranke, " History of Servia," pp. 252, 256. ■ Ranke, op. ciU, p. 264. THE GENESIS OF SERBIA 69 forced Michael in his turn to take refuge on Austrian territory (1842). Michael was replaced by Alexander Karagjorgjevid, son of the murdered Kara George. Russia's opposition to the change naturally forced the new prince into the Austrian sphere of influence, and this tendency was strengthened by the events of 1848. The Serbs of the Banat and Slavonia, under the leadership of the Patriarch Rajaiiid, eagerly espoused the Habsburg cause against the Magyars, and the restoration of the Serbian Voivodina and the further concessions promised to them by the Emperor won for him and for Austria the sympathies of the Serbs of the principality also ; many of whom crossed the Save and Danube as volunteers in the Austrian army. During the Crimean War Russian influence upon the prince and his court declined still further ; but his feeble and vacillating policy alienated the masses, which had never ceased to be Russophil. In 1858 Alexander, who had hitherto governed through the Senate, for the first time ventured to summon the national assembly, which promptly voted his depo- sition and the recall of the veteran Prince Milos. His long exile had failed to curb Milos's autocratic lean- ings, and he celebrated his return by the expulsion or imprisonment of several of the leading Serbian statesmen. But his death in September i860 restored Michael to power, and marks the close of what may be described as the patriarchal era of Serbian history. Michael was in many ways the wisest ruler whom Serbia has produced, combining the native untrained wit of the founder of his dynasty with the education and wider outlook of a new generation. The arbitrary and slipshod methods of his father were superseded by a genuine zeal for constitutional procedure. 70 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR Numerous administrative reforms were introduced, a national militia was created under French officers, and the old semi-Turkish constitution of 1830 was remodelled on Western lines. Serbia found in Michael a jealous guardian of her rights against any encroachments on the part of the suzerain Powers. In 1862, as the result of an affray, the Porte consented to the demolition of the Turkish quarter of Belgrade and to the dismantling of the Turkish fortresses of Sokol and Uzice. Finally, in 1867, as the result of Michael's firm attitude, the few remaining garri- sons were withdrawn, and on May 6th the last Turkish soldier quitted Serbian soil. To Michael's far-sighted view Serbia was but the advance guard of Balkan unity. Her liberation of Bosnia from Turkish rule was to be the first stage towards the emancipation of her Bulgarian kinsmen, whose eyes in those days were still turned towards Belgrade with hope and sympathy. The growing perception of kinship among all branches of the Southern Slavs was eloquently expressed by Michael's contemporary, Danilo of Montenegro, who addressed him with the words : " Form the kingdom of Serbia, and I shall gladly be the first to mount guard before your palace." No less cordial were Michael's rela- tions with the great Bishop Strossmayer. The first germs of a Balkan League may be traced in Michael's relations with Prince Alexander Couza of Roumania and his youthful successor Charles of Hohenzollern, with the Bulgarian Committee in Bucarest, and with Kossuth, the exiled Governor of Hungary. But with all his enthusiasm for the Jugoslav ideal, he did not go far enough for Garasanin, the most audacious and speculative of Serbian statesmen, and the conflict which ensued, coupled with his relapse in internal THE GENESIS OF SERBIA 71 affairs into the autocratic habits which he had avoided earlier in his reign, aroused the enmity of the younger generation, and above all of the Omladina, an active society which had its headquarters in Southern Hun- gary and dabbled in secret revolutionary propaganda. On June lo, 1868, he was assassinated by a group of partisans of the rival dynasty, and though their con- spiracy proved abortive, infinite harm was done to the cause of Serbia by the removal of so wise a statesman and by the accentuation of the fatal dynastic feud. Michael was succeeded by his cousin Milan, then a boy of fourteen. The Regency, presided over by Jovan Ristid, may be said to have inaugurated con- stitutional government in Serbia, though on distinctly oligarchical lines. The constitution of 1869 created a single chamber based upon almost universal suffrage but modified by the prince's power to nominate one- quarter of the assembly. Its members had no powers of initiative ; the introduction of new laws, the con- vocation and dissolution of the chamber lay entirely in the hands of the prince. The only definite advance upon earlier practice was the establishment of cabinet responsibility. Prince Milan typifies a class of which the Balkan Peninsula has been only too prolific during the past century — a class which has discarded the primitive virtues of the peasant and imitated the more super- ficial vices of the West without its more solid virtues. Heredity and education were alike against him. Excess had plunged his father into an early grave, while his mother was notorious as the mistress of Prince Alexander Couza of Roumania. He himself grew up in an atmosphere of intrigue and flattery such as might have undermined far stronger char- acters than his. 72 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR For some years after attaining his majority Milan pursued a Russophil policy, and the rapid rise of Pan-Slav feeling during the seventies seemed to justify his attitude. The revolt of Bosnia and Herzegovina, inhabited by a purely Serbo-Croat population, pro- foundly affected their kinsmen in Serbia and Monte- negro (1875) ; and it soon became obvious that intervention was only a matter of time. But Milan hesitated between the fear of offending Vienna and incertitude as to the attitude of Petrograd, and finally dismissed the Ristid ministry, which favoured energetic support of the Bosnian rebels. This action merely pjDstponed the decision, and placed Milan at a dis- advantage as compared to his rivals, Prince Nicholas of Montenegro and Prince Peter Karagjorgjevid, the latter of whom was already proving his soldierly qualities as one of the leaders of the rising. In the summer of 1876 Milan was obliged to recall Ristid to power and, conjointly with Montenegro, to declare war upon the Turks, at the same time issuing a pro- clamation which foreshadowed the restoration of the mediaeval Serbian Empire, But in the meantime Russia had drawn nearer to Austria-Hungary, and at the momentous interview of Reichstadt in July 1876 appears to have recognized what was virtually a veto upon Serbia's expansion to the west. Her acquisition of Bosnia, argued Andrassy, would con- stitute a menace to Austria, and rather than tolerate it, the latter was prepared to annex Serbia.^ The Serbian army, though led by the Russian General Cernajev and augmented by many Russian volunteers, proved no match for the Turks, and was on the point of being crushed when the Tsar imposed an armistice, under threat of immediate war. When ' Denis, " La Grande Serbie," p. 108. THE GENESIS OF SERBIA 73 in April 1877 Russia and Roumania attacked the Turks, the two Serbian principalities at once resumed hostiHties and may fairly claim to have contributed their quota to the final result. But the Treaty of San Stefano reflects the influence of Reichstadt, for its chief inspirer Ignatiev, obviously regarding the western half of the Peninsula as lying within the sphere of Austria-Hungary, aimed at counteracting this by the creation of a Big Bulgaria. Thus Serbia seemed about to be crushed between the upper and the nether millstone. At the Congress of Berlin her delegates were treated with scant ceremony and like the Greeks and Roumanians excluded from its deliberations. Britain had already secretly recognized Austria- Hungary's title to Bosnia (June 6, 1878) and as the Congress was about to separate, Russia by a similar convention promised to raise no objections to a permanent occupation of Novibazar. The short- sighted policy of GorCakov, bent upon securing material compensations for Russia, concentrated all its hopes upon Bulgaria and thus drove Serbia, like Roumania, into the orbit of Austria-Hungary. The occupation of Bosnia, the final recognition of Serbian independence and the cession of Nis, Pirot, and Vranja to Serbia, and of Niksid and Antivari to Montenegro, could not atone for the occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Indeed the very fact that Turkish stagnation was to give place to the rule of a civilized Great Power, aroused the deepest alarm among the Serbs. No one was deceived by the public assurance that the occupation was merely temporary ; and experience of Magyar methods farther north might well lead the Serbs to fear the adoption of a policy of assimilation or repression. Since 1878 hatred of Austria-Hungary 74 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR has been the dominant note of Serbian public opinion ; and economic causes reinforced their resentment at the fate of Bosnia. This did not however prevent Milan, in his disillusionment at Russia's attitude, from throwing himself into the arms of her rival and becoming little better than the vassal of Vienna. A commercial agreement was followed in 1881 by a secret political treaty and by the extension of Austrian financial influence in Serbia ; and it was Austria who encouraged Milan in 1882 to assume the royal dignity. Milan openly declared his hostility to Panslavism as " the chief enemy of the Slav idea. Russia is in- satiable and wishes to engulf Serbia, while Germaniza- tion is scarcely a danger. In the impending conflict between Teuton and Slav my intention and will is that Serbia should remain neutral." ^ Milan's fatal policy of substituting a Serbian for a Slavonic policy reached its height in 1885, when Prince Alexander of Bulgaria offended the Tsar by his acceptance of the union with Eastern Roumelia, and the recall of all Russian oiSicers from the newly formed Bulgarian army seemed to place it at the mercy of a hostile neighbour. King Milan, then, con- stituted himself the champion of that Treaty of Berlin from which his own race had suffered most, against the movement for national unity among his nearest neighbours and kinsmen. The growing discontent which the scandals of his private life and the corrup- tion of his political regime had engendered, coupled with the growing popularity of the rival dynasty, unquestionably encouraged Milan to adopt a policy of prestige and foreign aggrandizement. But the main factor in embroiling Bulgaria and Serbia was the fatal rivalry of Austria and Russia for influence in I Cit. Denis, op. cit., p. 116. THE GENESIS OF SERBIA 75 Belgrade. This rivalry, which took the form of end- less political intrigues, has been the curse of the two Slav states of the Peninsula, and has converted the splendid ideal of Jugoslav Unity, as conceived by Bishop Strossmayer and Prince Michael, into a deadly feud between two natural allies. Milan's absolutely unjustifiable onslaught upon Bulgaria ended in swift disaster. Overhaste, bad generalship, the lack of equip- ment and cannon, and indeed the absence of any serious strategical plan, proved fatal to the Serbian arms. At the battle of Slivnitza the Bulgarians were completely victorious, and their advance into Serbia was only arrested by the arrival of an Austrian emissary. Count Khevenhiiller, in the camp of Prince Alexander, to impose an armistice and to announce that any further advance would be opposed by Austrian troops. Milan had failed to prevent the union of the " Two Bulgarias," but had earned for his people the enmity of a race whose tenacity is as proverbial as its insatiable appetite. He returned to Belgrade thoroughly discredited, and with no alternative save to become the political agent and vassal of Austria- Hungary. The scandals of his private life grew in intensity and culminated in his divorce from Queen Nathalie. Not content with quarrelling, the royal couple took the whole Yellow Press of Europe into their confidence, until unhappy Serbia became a by- word. Embittered by a situation which his own boundless levity had created, Milan ended by recrimi- nations against his people. " For the love of God," he wrote on one occasion to his wife, "and in the name of your son, do not trust the Serbs." In 1889 he saved himself from an impossible position by pushing through a new and much more liberal constitution, and then immediately abdicating in favour of his only 76 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR son Alexander. The new constitution represented a very real advance upon that of 1869, notably in its extension of the suffrage and in its removal of the restrictions upon those eligible for parliament. The Regency was again placed in the hands of Ristid and of two prominent generals ; but the former's harsh and unconciliatory manners led him to neglect the young king's education, and accentuated still further the acute party strife between Liberal and Radical, between Austrophil and Russophil. Milan and Nathalie con- tinued their mutual abuse beside the throne of their son and kept Serbia in perpetual ferment, until drastic measures were taken to enforce their residence abroad. Alexander, to an even greater degree than his father, was the victim of his intolerable surroundings ; growing up in an atmosphere of suspicion and intrigue which stifled all generous or straightforward feelings, he became moody and capricious and insensibly acquired those habits of petty despotism which seemed to have become engrained in all the members of his house. In 1893 he displayed a sudden and unexpected energy by arresting the Regents at his own table, and himself assuming the reins of government. Success tempted him to indulge in similar experiments, and a year later he abolished his father's new constitution and reverted to that of 1869. This was but the first of a series of arbitrary and unconstitutional acts which shook the very foundation of Serbian political life and deepened still further the gulf which was opening between the nation and the Obrenovic dynasty. In 1899 ^^ unsuQcessful attempt against the life of Milan provided the excuse for wholesale proceedings against the Radical party, which had long possessed the confidence of the mass of electors, and was now driven by persecution more and more into the arms THE GENESIS OF SERBIA 77 of the Karagjorgjevic party. The event which sealed Alexander's fate was his disastrous marriage with his former mistress, Draga Ma^in (1900). By this act the King at once risked the future of the dynasty and renounced all hope of those cordial relations with the courts of Europe, of which Serbia stood in such sore need after the never-ending scandals of Milan's reign. Even his final estrangement from Milan, who died soon afterwards in exile, and his adoption of a markedly Russophil attitude, could not allay the general disgust. In 1901 he sought to recover popularity by the promulgation of yet another and more liberal constitution and by the extension of liberty of the Press. But these concessions merely supplied his enemies with fresh weapons for the campaign against him, and his love of sudden and arbitrary changes increased the intolerable uncertainty of the situation. At this moment Queen Draga, pos- sessed by the tragic illusion of Mary Tudor, sum- moned a Petrograd specialist to supervise her approaching confinement ; and the fiasco which ensued gave rise to persistent rumours that a foundling infant was to have been smuggled into the palace. Another and better authenticated rumour, that Draga had induced her husband to recognize her brother, Nikodem Lunjevica, as heir-apparent, roused their enemies to drastic action. On the night of June 10, 1903, Alexander and Draga were assassi- nated by a gang of Serbian officers under circum- stances of peculiar brutality ; and a number of prominent adherents of the King shared the same fate. The Obrenovid dynasty was thus at an end, and Peter Karagjorgjevic, son of Prince Alexander and grandson of Kara George, was unanimously elected to the vacant throne. The constitution of 78 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR 1889 was restored, subject to certain modifications, and Serbia thus acquired single-chamber government and a franchise so wide as to be virtually universal. Nothing can palliate the circumstances of the crime ; yet no thinking man can fail to endorse the con- sidered verdict of a distinguished French historian, who sums up the whole situation in a single sentence : " History, whose duty it is to brand the assassins, none the less reserves its supreme condemnation for the princes who had reduced the country to such a degree of moral indigence that it saw safety only in crime." ^ ' For the first three years of his reign King Peter was little better than a hostage in the hands of the regicides, and the new regime lay under a dark cloud of suspicion which found expression in a virtual diplomatic boycott. The situation was complicated by party dissensions between " Old " and " Young " Radicals and by serious financial difficulties. The real novelty was the appearance for the first time in Serbian history of a sovereign who was constitutional by instinct, not merely by necessity, and whose habits of personal effacement threw into sharp relief the theatrical vagaries of his predecessors. The old methods of favouritism and extravagance gave place to the first rudiments of economy and reform. But the rapid internal revival which resulted alarmed the Governments of Vienna and Budapest, and prompted them to forestall any attempt on Serbia's part to escape from their economic vassalage. At the first news of the conclusion of a customs union between Serbia and Bulgaria (December 1905) ^ Austria-Hungary ' Denis, op. cit., p. 122. * There are grounds for believing that the project was prematurely betrayed to Vienna by Prince Ferdinand himself. THE GENESIS OF SERBIA 79 threatened to close her frontiers to Serbian products and to allow her commercial treaty with Serbia to lapse. But Mr. Pasid and his Government stood firm, and the so-called " Pig War," instead of placing Serbia's staple industry at the mercy of the Dual Monarchy, enabled her to develop new trade outlets in Egypt, Italy, and France. The conflict was pro- longed by the demand of the Ballplatz that Serbia should place her orders for new cannon with the great Austrian armament firm of Skoda. Such a ' surrender would have left Serbia and her army completely at the mercy of her northern neighbour, and the Government of Belgrade preferred to go to Le Creusot for guns and to Paris for money. The favourable terms on which the French financiers accorded the loan of 1907 were a sign of Serbia's reviving credit and an encouragement to the advo- cates of emancipation from Austrian influence. In March 1908 a commercial treaty was concluded between Vienna and Belgrade. But scarcely had calm been seemingly restored to their troubled rela- tions than a still more acute crisis was evoked by the parallel action of Francis Joseph and Ferdinand of Coburg in declaring the annexation of Bosnia-Herze- govina and the independence of Bulgaria, It is now an open secret that in thus tearing to shreds the Treaty of Berlin the two delinquents acted in collusion, and it is almost certain that the secret understanding between Sofia and Vienna was very largely inspired by a joint design against Belgrade. The annexation came as an intense shock to public opinion in Serbia and Montenegro and kindled into flame those national aspirations which the cruel disillusionment of 1878 seemed to have extinguished, but which had never ceased to smoulder under the 80 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR ashes. 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 dis- content 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, and 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 document which had been signed a generation earlier. He had failed to reckon with the outcry which this technical breach of international lav.' evoked : like Bethmann-Hollweg, he had no blind faith in "scraps of paper," and had no scruple in tearing up the Treaty of Berlin on which the whole Balkan settle- ment had rested. The two Serb states challenged the accomplished fact, and seemed bent on staking their very existence upon war with the great neigh- bouring 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 THE GENESIS OF SERBIA 81 to address a Note to the Great Powers, declaring that the annexation and internal condition of Bosnia did not in any way concern her.^ This reverse had a chastening effect upon Serbia ; it restored her to a sense of hard realities, and taught her to sub- stitute hard work for loud talk. From that day dates the rapid renaissance of her national spirit and of its most practical form of expression, the Serbian army, from which the regicide elements had been slowly but steadily eliminated. Indeed it is not too much to say that in order fully to understand the motives which inspired Serbia and Montenegro during the Bosnian crisis and during the crowded history of the past eight eight years, it is necessary to know something of the movement for national unity which has spread so rapidly among all sections of the Southern Slav population. This will form the sub- ject of the following chapter. ' This declaration was made the basis of the Austrian Note to Serbia in July 1914. 6 CHAPTER V THE IDEA OF SOUTHERN SLAV UNITY Since the fall of their mediaeval Empire placed the Serbs under the Turkish rule, their kinsmen, the Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes farther north, v/ere in very different circumstances, enjoying varying degrees of autonomy under the sceptre of the Imperial House of Habsburg. As we have seen, for some centuries after the extinction of the Croatian national dynasty the Eastern Adriatic coast-line was contested between Hungary and Venice ; but Croatia always managed to preserve a species of home rule under the crown of St. Stephen, varying in extent and often infringed, but never wholly abrogated until 1912. During the long Turkish night these provinces pinned all their hopes upon the House of Habsburg. Karlowitz, Novi Sad (Neusatz), and Buda became the centres of Serbian ecclesiastical life and of such fragments of culture as had survived the Turkish onslaught ; while the Military Frontiers provided Austria for many generations with some of her best fighting material. But though the enslaved and scattered condition of the race made any serious movement towards unity impossible until quite recent times, the idea of the essential racial and linguistic unity between the three western branches of the Southern THE IDEA OF SOUTHERN SLAV UNITY 83 Slavs is by no means new. Interesting traces of it are to be found in the Slav Calvinist literature which issued so freely from the presses of Tubingen and Urach during the sixteenth century and helped to spread Protestantism among the Slovenes ; but of course in this instance national motives were sub- ordinate to religious. In the seventeenth century the republic of Ragusa became a brilliant centre of Slav culture, and the writings of her greatest poet, Ivan Gunduli(5, are inspired by the ancient glories of mediaeval Serbia and Bosnia, and by a remarkably modern feeling of kinship with all the various branches of the Southern Slav race. The first ad- vocate of the Pan-Slav idea in Russia was a Croat Catholic priest from Dalmatia — Krizanid ; and it may be noted that he shared the fate which has so often been meted out in Russia to the author of a new idea : he was banished to Siberia. But the great awakener was no other than the First Napoleon, who by his creation of an Illyrian State comprising most of the Eastern Adriatic coast, and having its capital at Ljubljana (Laibach) kindled aspirations which have never since been extinguished. The odes of the Slovene priest Vodnik, in honour of Illyria and its creator, play the same part in Southern Slav literature as the contemporary poems of Allieri and Manzoni in the Italian revival. After the Congress of Vienna the movement languished under the reactionary influence of Metternich ; but in the thirties it began again, having transferred it- self from Laibach to Agram. Ljudevit Gaj became the soul of Croat resistance to the aggression of the Magyars. A man of Western culture and fiery eloquence, he wrote under the inspiration of Czech and Polish poets, and may be regarded as the founder 84 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR of modern Croat journalism ; while the reforms which he introduced into Croat orthography prepared the way for the literary revival of the last half- century. But Gaj was essentially a politician and an agitator rather than a poet, and the great influence acquired by the journals which he founded in 1834 was due, not so much to literary merits, as to the daring political ideas which they expounded, and which inspired a whole generation of j^ounger patriots. In the course of his half-rhapsodical propaganda of the Illyrian idea, he compared the Southern Slav countries to a broken triangular lyre in the hands of Europe, and expressed the hope that these discordant strings would soon be harmonized once more. He con- ducted an open campaign against the Magyars, whom he rightly regarded as the main obstacle to Southern Slav unity. "The Magyars," he cried, "are an island in the Slav ocean. I did not create the ocean nor excite its waves ; see ye to it that they do not break over your heads and engulf you." In 1840 he flung at his opponents the confident words, " To-day you are in the majority, but the child that is born is mine." Gaj's agitation could not fail to awaken a ready response in Croatia, in view of the attempt to force the Magyar language down the throats, not only of the nationalities of Hungary proper but also of autonomous Croatia. In 1843 the Hungarian parlia- ment, in the teeth of opposition from the Croatian delegates, refused to exempt Croatia from the far- reaching linguistic innovations with which it sought to crown its programme of progressive Magyarization. The most which Croatia could secure was a respite of six years, after which Croatia's special position was to THE IDEA OF SOUTHERN SLAV UNITY 85 cease. It was Kossuth himself who took up the most extreme attitude throughout this struggle, who pro- fessed himself unable to find Croatia on the map, and answered the protests of the Croats by the arrogant phrase, " I know no Croatian nationality." After the outbreak of the revolution in 1848 Kossuth's attitude became even less conciliatory, and after meeting the claims of a Serbian deputation from the Banat with a point-blank refusal, he dismissed them with the un- compromising words, "The sword must decide." Gaj's great political role tends to overshadow his sterling merits as a linguistic reformer, and his career ended in discredit and disillusionment. No such clouds obscure the figure of his great contem- porary Vuk Karadzic, who after having served as an interpreter to the illiterate Kara George during the first years of the Serbian war of independence, rapidly made his mark among the Slavonic scholars of Europe by his publication of a collection of Serbian songs and ballads, folk-tales, and proverbs. For many years Vuk travelled through the various Serbian countries gathering fresh material, and his published results won general recognition, and secured for him the friendship of Goethe, Grimm, and Ranke. His grammars and dictionary will always remain the foundation-stone of Balkan philological studies and entitle him to be regarded as the Grimm of Serbia. Above all, the phonetic reforms which he introduced into the old Cyrillic alphabet, on the principle that a language should be written as it is spoken and con- versely pronounced as it is written, emancipated the language from the false conventions of the mediaeval Church, elevated the vernacular to the position of the literary language, and brought the various Serbo-Croat dialects into line and prepared the way for that literary 86 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR unity which is the sure forerunner of political union. Vuk found a worthy successor in Danidic, whose translation of the New Testament stands high amongst its fellows. Croat national feeling had already reached a high pitch in the forties. In the year of revolution (1848) the Croats produced a great military leader in their famous Ban, Baron Jela<5ic, who rescued the throne of the Habsburgs when it seemed about to totter, and who was rewarded with the same ingratitude which Francis Joseph has always meted out to his most devoted military commanders. JelaCic became the vindicator of Croatian national rights against Magyar aggression, and at a famous session of the Diet revived the historical phrase of one of his predecessors — Regnum regno non praescribit leges. Not the least singular feature in the movement of 1848, and one which should be recalled by those who exaggerate the jealousy between Serb and Croat, is that Jelacii, the Catholic Ban, and Raja^id, the Serbian Orthodox Patriarch, worked hand in hand in the utmost harmony for the cause of Serbo-Croat unity under the Habsburg throne. It is in this connection that mention should be made of two of the greatest figures in the move- ment for Southern Slav unity — its poet, the Vladika Peter of Montenegro, and its patron and spiritual inspirer, Bishop Strossmayer of Djakovo. It is a good omen for the future of a race of two main religions, that these two great men, a Catholic and an Orthodox bishop, stand side by side as the champions of unity and concord. Peter is the most heroic figure of the Montenegrin dynasty of Petrovid-Njegos. Standing almost a head above his tallest soldiers, he excelled almost equally as a warrior, a statesman, and a priest ; and many Serb THE IDEA OF SOUTHERN SLAV UNITY 87 still regard him as their foremost poet. His chief epic, " The Mountain Garland " {Gorski vijenac), is a revela- tion of Serbian ideals as they had survived during Montenegro's secular struggle against the Turk, and is inspired by that love of freedom which made the poet- prince melt down the type of his new printing press to make bullets for the Turkish war. Throughout life Peter acted in the spirit of his own phrase, Brat je mio, koje vjere bio (He is my brother, no matter what his religion). The figure of Bishop Strossmayer deserves to be treated in greater detail, because it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that what is best and most attrac- tive in the Croatia of to-day is in a large measure due to him, and above all because the ideal to which he devoted his life and energy, the ideal of mutual tolerance and amity between the two rival Churches of the West and East, as the essential basis of national concord among all Southern Slavs, has gained ground with astonishing rapidity since his death. In the West he is probably best known for the courageous part which he played at the Vatican Council of 1870, when his oratory roused the admiration even of his keenest opponents, and when he finally voted in a minority of three against papal infallibility. But his true claim to fame is as " The first Son of the Croat Nation," and as the eloquent advocate of Balkan liberation and unity. Marco Minghetti, in conversation with the Belgian publicist Emile de Laveleye, once affirmed that he had met at close quarters almost all the great men of his age. " There are only two," he added, " who gave me the impression of belonging to another species than ourselves. These two were Bismarck and Strossmayer." In 1848 Strossmayer became Bishop of Djakovo, and for the next fifty-five years devoted 88 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR the enormous revenues of his diocese to the national cause. He founded schools and seminaries, endowed the clergy fund, and revived the Slav college in Rome, San Girolamo degli Schiavoni. He instituted bursaries for every kind of research, and made possible the publication of historical and philological works, and collections of documents, folk-lore, and popular poetry. In both the material and the intellectual sense he was the true founder of the Southern Slav Academy in Zagreb (Agram), which was designed as a society " to give a common impulse to the intel- lectual movement among Bulgars, Serbs, and Croats." He was one of the chief founders of the national Croat University ; and the modern gallery, museum and library of the Croatian capital are very largely composed of his donations. Finally his own cathedral of Djakovo, decorated with the frescoes and mosaics of n^iodern Croat artists, will remain a permanent monument to his artistic taste. His enthusiasm for the Slav cause made of him the lifelong champion of the Glagolitic rite, the ancient Slavonic liturgy, which has survived for a thousand years on the coasts of Istria and Dalmatia. His veneration for the Slav apostles Cyril and Methodius brought him into contact with high dignitaries of the Russian Orthodox Church, and earned for him the abuse of Magyar politicians and a quite unmerited rebuke from his own sovereign. Laveleye describes him on the occasion of their first meeting as a saint of the Middle Ages, such as Fra Angelico painted on the walls of San Marco in Florence. His correspondence with Mr. Gladstone, even if some- times characterized by excessive idealism, is interesting as revealing a true instinct on the part of both men, both with regard to the hopeless barbarism of Turkish rule and the triumph of national idealism over the artificial barriers of religious bigotry. THE IDEA OF SOUTHERN SLAV UNITY 89 No national movement that is worth anything at all has been without its oppressors ; and in the case of Croatia the Magyars have provided a surfeit of oppres- sion and misrule. The foundation on which the relations of Hungary and Croatia have rested in modern times is the Compromise of 1868, which followed the larger Compromise between Hungary and Austria. In the latter Croatia had been com- pletely ignored, and now the former was only passed by means of a faked electoral law arbitrarily pro- mulgated, of grossly corrupt elections, and of drastic muzzling of the Press. In certain respects its pro- visions were liberal, and its authors, Deak and Andrassy, were certainly honest in their intention to respect it, but it most emphatically did not represent the wishes of Croatia itself. Its financial provisions have enabled Hungary to indulge in the crudest possible economic exploitation of Croatia ever since. The Ban was placed in the impossible position of being appointed by the Crown on the nomination of the Hungarian premier, and yet of being responsible to the Croatian Diet. But perhaps the most extra- ordinary detail in the whole document is the clause regulating the status of Fiume, which deserves special emphasis as the first link in that chain of impudent political forgery of which the Southern Slavs have so repeatedly been the victims. In 1868 the Magyars insisted upon excluding Fiume from Croatia and making it autonomous under the Hungarian Govern- ment. Even the packed majority in the Croatian Diet refused to ratify this, and hence in the Croat text § 66 refers to Fiume, " regarding which an agreement could not be reached." The Magyar text, on the other hand, contains a clear definition of the status of the town and district as " a special body connected with the Hungarian crown " (Separatum sacra: rcgni coronoi 90 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAE adnexum corpus). The two versions of the document were in due course submitted to His Majesty for signature ; and a thin strip of paper, bearing on it the Croat translation of the Magyar version, was then stuck over the corresponding portion of the Croat text 1 ! The original document is preserved in the Croatian archives, where this singular falsification of an important State-document may be verified. The inter- polated passage is not even in the same handwriting as the rest of the document. In other words, the present status of Fiume has never been sanctioned by the Croatian Parliament and is a one-sided claim of Hungary, unproved and merely upheld by superior force and by methods which in private life would be punished by penal servitude. Within a few years of the Compromise a scandalous attempt was made to discredit the political influence of Strossmayer by barefaced forgeries, suggesting revolutionary intrigues with Serbia and Russia ; and as we shall see, the use of forged documents as a political weapon has become a tradition of Magyar policy in Croatia. The first ten years after the Compromise were never- theless a period of comparative calm and natural development in Croatia. But the Bosnian rising in 1876 and its sequel, the occupation of the two provinces by Austria-Hungary, kindled anew the racial conflict between the Magyars and Croats. The Magyars sympathized openly with the Turks, pre- sented a sword of honour to the Turkish commander in the campaign against Serbia, and brutally perse- cuted Svetozar Mileti6 and other Serbian leaders in the Hungarian Banat ; while the claims advanced by the Croat opposition for the union of Bosnia with Croatia were keenly resented by Magyar constitutional Chauvinists^ who revived the shadowy mediaeval pre- THE IDEA OF SOUTHERN SLAV UNITY 91 tensions of the Hungarian Crown to suzerainty over Bosnia. In 1883 petty causes reopened the latent quarrel between Croats and Magyars in an acute form ; and Coloman Tisza, the high-handed Premier of Hungary, temporarily suspended the Croatian constitution, entrusted a high cavalry officer with the restoration of order, and then appointed as Ban his own cousin, Count Khuen-Hcdervary. The twenty years of the Khuen regime (1883-1903), coinciding with the decadent Obrenovid regime in Serbia, form the most humiliating epoch in Southern Slav history. Khuen will always fill a special niche of his own in history ; for he was probably the most effectively corrupt Satrap of a subject province whom the nineteenth century has produced, while in 1910 as Hungarian premier he organized electoral corruption on a scale hitherto unsurpassed, not merely in Hungary but probably in modern Europe. His iron nerve, his calm detachment and energy, soon won him an altogether exceptional position. He was an un- erring judge of men, and followed the deliberate policy of winning over his political opponents by personal and other inducements, and of closing every public career to men of independent views and keen national feeling. The Croats themselves do not exaggerate when they reproach him as the corrupter of a whole generation. The so-called Mamelukes with whom he succeeded in filling the Diet were men whose prospects in life depended upon subservience to the Government. The opposition was silenced by unscrupulous revisions of the franchise and of the standing orders of the House, and also by ruthless muzzling of the Press. Above all, Khuen's tireless devotion to detail, and his intimate knowledge of the character and personal circumstances of all the Croat and Serb leaders, 92 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR enabled him to exercise over them a fascination not unlike that of the boa-constrictor for the rabbit. The result to Croatia was political stagnation and a fatal flaw in the intellectual and moral outlook. It would be interesting to compare the methods and results of Count Khuen with those of his apt pupil King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, whose close connection with Hungary and natural affinity with Magyar political methods are still not as well known as they should be. Above all, Khuen's system depended upon playing off Croat and Serb against each other, upon inflaming the petty passions and religious bigotry of Catholic and Orthodox, and upon skilfully exploiting the ultra- patriotic but short-sighted Croat minority under Anthony Starcevic. For many years this game placed the Serb minority of twenty-five deputies at his beck and call. But by 1903 a younger generation was growing up both among Croats and Serbs, which had received its education in Prague and other intellectual centres, and was tired to death of racial brawling. To these men, with their new outlook, it was more and more obvious that the sole hope of progress and reformation lay in the unity of Croat and Serb against Magyar aggression. The Illyrian ideal of Gaj had been trans- lated into the Jugoslav ideal of Strossmayer, and in the very year of Strossmayer's death at the age of ninety the Jugoslav ideal again became practical politics. It is worthy of note that the new movement derived much of its motive force and several of its ablest leaders from Dalmatia, where the problem of unity presented itself in a somewhat similar form. In Croatia Serb and Croat form 92 per cent, of the population ; if they are divided against each other, the Magyar rules. In Dalmatia Serb and Croat form 95 per cent, of the population ; and if they are divided THE IDEA OF SOUTHERN SLAV UNITY 93 against each other, the Italian or the German rules. In each case Serbo-Croat unity offers the sole hope of progress. In 1905 the latent conflict between the Magyars and the Crown developed into an acute constitutional crisis. The Liberal party, after thirty-six years of rule, lost its majority at the polls, and was confronted by a victorious Coalition of opposition parties whose pro- gramme was definitely unacceptable to the Crown. A similar Coalition was formed by Croat and Serb opposition parties in Croatia and Dalmatia, and their mutual compact, embodied in the Resolutions of Fiume and Zara, developed into a definite league with the Hungarian Coalition leaders.^ In the spring of 1906 the two Coalition groups triumphed in Hun- gary and Croatia, and, after the acutest parliamentary crisis since 1848, assumed the reins of government. The Serbo-Croat Coalition naturally expected that it would be left free to carry out its programme of internal reform, embodying universal suffrage, secret ballot, free elections, liberty of association and assembly and of the Press, financial autonomy, independence of judges, and guarantees of personal liberty. The bare catalogue of these demands is a sufficient comment upon the Khuen regime in Croatia, and the fact that the attempt to introduce them was so utterly distasteful to the Magyar Govern- ment throws a singular light on the attitude of the ruling caste to political reform. In May 1907 Mr. Francis Kossuth, as Minister of Commerce, introduced in the Hungarian parliament a bill for the Magyari- zation of the railways in Croatia. Its provisions ' Two of the chief negotiators on the Croat side, Dr. Trunibi(i and M. Supilo, arc now in London as prominent members of the Jugoslav Committee. 94 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR involved a flagrant breach alike of the letter and of the spirit of the Hungaro-Croatian Compromise, and were at once recognized as a direct challenge. After two months of determined obstruction by the forty Croat delegates in Budapest, a new bill was intro- duced, consisting of a single sentence, and em- powering the Minister of Commerce to enforce the provisions of the obstructed bill, until such time as it should have received full parliamentary sanction. The national government fell in Croatia. After a brief interlude of six months, in which a high judi- cial official attempted to reconcile the devil and the deep sea. Baron Paul Ranch, the son of the Ban who steered the Compromise of 1868 through a packed Diet, was appointed Ban amid universal protests and demonstrations. The Croatian constitution was not formally abolished, but parliament was not allowed to meet, and Ranch introduced an intolerable system of administrative pressure, judicial corruption, and press persecution, supplemented by widespread espionage and calumny. Above all, he set himself to enflame what was left of anti-Serb feeling in the country, and a few Clerical fanatics were naive enough to fall into the trap and to join hands temporarily with the extremely shady elements upon which the Ban relied. The feeling of the country towards the Rauch regime is best illustrated by the astounding fact that Rauch with all his official apparatus failed to secure a single seat for his crea- tures at the general elections of 1908, from which the Serbo-Croat Coalition emerged stronger than before. The crowning incident in Rauch's anti-Serbian campaign, pursued with the object of sphtting the Coalition, was the notorious High Treason trial at Agram, of which fifty-three Serbs of Croatia were the victims, and which dragged on for no less than THE IDEA OF SOUTHERN SLAV UNITY 95 seven months amid scandalous scenes such as recall the methods of Judge Jeffries himself. The indict- ment, extending to over one hundred large octavo pages, was actually published as a supplement to the official gazette, and scattered broadcast over the country. Some of the prisoners v/ere forced to share the cells of condemned murderers, and throughout the trial were repeatedly excluded from the proceed- ings or sentenced to solitary confinement, dark cells, fasting, or board beds on the slightest provocation. Hundreds of witnesses were called for the prose- cution, but almost all the witnesses for the defence were disallowed. Counsel for the defence, like their clients, were browbeaten and insulted by the presid- ing judge and prosecutor. One of them, on his return from collecting evidence at Belgrade, was arrested and searched at the frontier, and the notes and documents which were seized from him appeared a week later in court, in the hands of the public prosecutor. Tarabocchia, the presiding judge, and Accurti, the public prosecutor — both Croats, like many other possessors of Italian names — were fre- quently to be seen together at night in a drunken condition in public cafes or restaurants of the capital ; and the scandal became so great that after public reference had been made to it by prominent mem- bers of the Austrian parliament in support of an interpellation on the Croatian situation, the Croatian High Court prohibited them from visiting public restaurants during the whole period of the trial. The chief aim of the trial was an attempt to prove the existence of widespread revolutionary plots in Croatia for union with Serbia, and thus to provide a case for Austria-Hungary in her contemplated military action against Serbia. Its chief tool was a shady young police spy called Nastid, who had acted 96 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR as agent-provocateur in Bosnia and then wormed him- self into the confidence of certain Belgrade Chauvinists. He had also figured prominently as Crown informer in the treason trial of Cetinje, and documentary evidence has since transpired proving him to be a common thief and paid spy of the Austrian General Staff. The main incriminating document was an effusion known as the Revolutionary Statute, which Nastic claimed to have brought back with him from Belgrade. Perhaps the most flagrant of its many absurdities is the fact that though it teems with ideas of an extreme republican character, the court was asked to believe that its authors enjoyed the confidence and active support of King Peter and Prince George. The trial had been begun as a demonstration to the outside world that Austria-Hungary was threatened by a dangerous Pan-Serb movement and as an excuse for tlie annexation of Bosnia. Within a month of its opening, however, the international crisis was unex- pectedly concluded by Russia's diplomatic surrender to the figure of William H "in shining armour," and by the consequent acceptance by Serbia of the humi- liating terms imposed from Vienna. At the last moment the Austrian war party was again baulked of its prey. The trial, which Baron Aehrenthal regarded as a convenient instrument of his policy, now became a growing embarrassment with which he would gladly have dispensed. But that embarrassment was still further accentuated by the famous Fried] ung case. On March 25, 1909, when the long drawn-out con- flict between Austria-Hungary and Serbia had reached its height and war seemed inevitable. Dr. Friedjung, the leading historian of modern Austria, published in the leading Viennese newspaper, the Neiie Freie Presse, an article containing the gravest imputations against THE IDEA OF SOUTHERN SLAV UNITY 97 the Serbian Government and dynasty, and openly charging the leaders of the Serbo-Croat Coalition of being in the pay of Serbia. This article was based upon a series of incriminating documents supplied to the historian by the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Office, and not unnaturally accepted by him as authentic. The Coalition leaders indignantly repu- diated the charge, and the result was a libel action by the entire Coalition against Dr. Friedjung and the editor of the clerical organ Reichspost, which had pub- lished similar charges. In spite of various efforts to secure a settlement, the case came up for trial in December 1909 in Vienna, and rapidly developed into one of the most sensational political trials of modern times. In the course of the trial and the subsequent debates of the Austrian Delegation the "documents" upon which the defence relied were proved to be impudent forgeries, concocted by minor officials of the Austro-Hungarian Legation in Belgrade. Chief among them were the voluminous minutes of a re- volutionary society which was alleged to exist in Belgrade. Its " president," Professor Markovid, braved the open intimidation of the Court and of the inspired Viennese Press, and appeared as witness for the pro- secution. He was able to prove by means of an official statement of the Berlin police authorities, that at the moment when he was supposed to be taking the chair at a revolutionary meeting in Belgrade he was actually attending lectures at Berlin University and making the acquaintance of several of the most eminent German jurists. This alibi was in itself sufficient to demolish Dr. Fried] ung's case ; but it subsequently transpired that these notorious " minutes " were written upon gigantic sheets of paper measuring 977 by 34*6 centi- metres ! That a society of youthful revolutionaries should keep minutes at all is sufficiently remarkable ; 7 98 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR that no society in Europe, least of all a revolutionary society, would use paper of this size is abundantly clear, and effectively disposes of the argument that the documents were brought by the informer Vasid from the society to the Legation, for not even the veriest tyro in diplomacy would have accepted such a docu- ment from the most plausible of spies or robbers. The true explanation is that the minutes were forged upon specially large paper in order that they might be the more easily photographed, and during the trial of Vasid at Belgrade it transpired that they had been fastened with drawing-pins to the study door of Swien- tochowski, the secretary of the Austro-Hungarian Legation. An equally damning ** document " was a forged telegram alleged to have been dispatched from a small place on the Serbo-Bosnian frontier by the leader of an irregular Serb band to Professor Markovic as president of the revolutionary Slovenski Jug. If genuine, it would of course have established a strong presumption, if not an absolute certainty, that Markovi(i had the supervision of guerilla bands operating against Austria. Unfortunately the forger had been clumsy enough to employ the wrong telegraph form ; and thus a message supposed to have been handed out by the post office had been written, and the office post- mark clumsily imitated, on a form such as is supplied to the public gratis for handed-in telegrams. Another interesting "document" produced by Professor Ma- saryk for the inspection of the Austrian Delegation was a sheet of paper containing three signatures of the Serbian ex-Minister Davidovic, who was alleged to be a leading member of the Slovenski Jug. It was thus established beyond possibility of doubt that some one had been practising the imitation of Davidovic's signature. Professor Masaryk, by his fearless and searching THE IDEA OF SOUTHERN SLAV UNITY 99 criticisms, finally brought home the responsibiHty for the forgeries to Count Forgach, the Austro-Hungarian Minister in Belgrade, whom, on the floor of the House, he openly branded as Count "Azev." This insulting comparison of a high diplomatic personage with the notorious Russian revolutionary, who was unmasked as a secret agent-provocateur of the police, and made away with by his outraged comrades, would have been absolutely unpardonable unless it had been supported by overwhelming evidence. Yet no attempt was made by Aehrenthal or his subordinates in the Ballplatz to rebut the charges or to clear Fcrgach's character. Indeed, according to Aehrenthal's own admissions, they had during many months accepted " documents " from Vasic. If, then, the receivers were ah the time well aware that this individual was a thief and a spy, what is to be thought of a statesman who could base a whole policy upon the authenticity of the " docu- ments " which Vasi6 supplied ? Count Forgach took no pains to conceal his opinion that his chief could be made to share the moral responsibility, and that he himself had not carried out nearly all that been de- manded of him. This is doubtless the explanation of the fact that Forgach, so far from falling into disgrace, was made a Privy Councillor and then transferred to the calmer atmosphere of Dresden, from which post he was eventually transferred to the Ballplatz itself as Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs. Thus under Aehrenthal's easy- going successor. Count Berchtold, Count Forgach came to play a decisive part in the Balkan policy of the Habsburg Monarchy during the critical years that followed. It was he who was largely responsible for the anti-Serb campaign in the Press of the Monarchy during the first Balkan war, for the notorious Prochaska affair — to which reference will be made later — and lor 100 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR the rebuff with which Austria-Hungary met the over- tures of the Serbian premier, Mr. Pasic. It was he who was equally responsible for the intrigues by which Austria-Hungary undermined the Balkan League, and, in conjunction with his Magyar compatriot Count Tisza, for the advice and encouragement which prompted King Ferdinand's treacherous attack upon Serbia and Greece. Finally he is, with Count Tisza and Herr von Tschirschky, the German Ambassador in Vienna, the joint author of the Austro-Hungarian note to Serbia, which was the immediate cause of the present European conflict. As a Magyar nobleman, with intimate Jewish connections. Count Forgach was an invaluable link between Magyar extremist policy and Berlin on the one hand and Salonica and Con- stantinople on the other. He has been and still is the soul of the conspiracy which aims at destroy- ing Serbian independence and finally crushing the Southern Slav idea. In view of his record as the inspirer of the Vasic forgeries, it cannot be emphasized too strongly that no statement of ''evidence" which comes from so tainted a source is of any value, and that if his influence cannot be eliminated when the time for peace negotiations comes, it must be dis- counted and combated from the very outset by the diplomacy of the Entente. The gross scandals of the Friedjung trial led to the fall of Baron Ranch ; but there was no change of system in Croatia. Under his successor. Dr. TomaSic, there was at first a slight lull, but before very long the friction between Hungary and Croatia was almost as acute as ever. The persecution of the preceding years had only cemented still further the league of Croat and Serb, and even despite internal jealousies every attempt to split the Coalition failed. At last in the spring of 191 2 the conflict between Zagreb and Buda- THE IDEA OF SOUTHERN SLAV UNITY 101 pest culminated in new elections of a grossly corrupt character, and then, when they had resulted in a dis- tinct rebuff for the Government, in the abolition of the Croatian Constitution by arbitrary decree of the Hun- garian Government, in the appointment of Mr. Cuvaj as dictator, and the introduction of a preventive censorship far more rigorous than anything modern Europe has known in peace time. A few months later this was followed by the suspension of the charter of the Serbian Orthodox Church, once more by decree from Budapest. These high-handed measures roused intense excite- ment throughout the Southern Slav world. The Hungarian flag was publicly burned in the streets of Croatian, Dalmatian, and Bosnian towns. There were continual demonstrations and protests, and interpella- tions by the Slovene and Croat members of the Aus- trian parliament. The movement even took hold of the schools, and as the result of the arbitrary expulsion of a schoolboy for his share in a street demonstration, the boys and girls of almost every school in Croatia and Bosnia went on strike. In Zagreb itself a proces- sion of over 5,000 pupils of both sexes between the ages of fourteen and twenty paraded the streets, sing- ing patriotic songs, shouting " Down with Cuvaj," and cheering the police when they tried to intervene ! The excitement which prevailed among the youth of the country took an unhealthy form, when in 191 2 the young Croat student Juki6 tried to assassinate Cuvaj, and only succeeded in killing a policeman and a very estimable official in the Department of Education. Some months later an equally futile attempt was made by another student, who took his own life. These incidents were followed by drastic measures against the Croat and Serb students and schoolboys throughout the south of the Monarchy. The lengths to which the authorities pushed their 102 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR foolish methods of repression may be judged by the fact that copies of Leopardi and Foscolo and even standard histories of the French Revokition were con- fiscated in many private houses. It is interesting to note that the excitement spread as far as Bulgaria ; numerous meetings of protest and sympathy for the victims of Cuvaj's rule were held in Burgas, Philip- popolis, and other towns during the summer of 191 2, until events gave another turn to Bulgarian sympathies and aspirations. From the true Austrian or Habsburg point of view, or indeed from the point of view of European peace, nothing could have been more unfortunate than the moment selected for what was the most flagrant violation of Croatian national rights ever committed by the Magyars in the course of the eight centuries of union between Hungary and Croatia. For the Cuvaj regime was at its very height when the Balkan League became involved in war with Turkey and by its rapid and overwhelming successes upset all the calculations of the Central Powers, and probably no less of the Entente. The battles of Liile Burgas and Kumanovo are in them- selves of equal importance as military events ; but so far as the moral effect was concerned, Kumanovo is unquestionably one of the decisive battles of modern times. The scales suddenly fell from the eyes of Europe, and Serbia stood revealed, no longer as the tool of the effete Obrenovic dynasty and its Viennese inspirers, no longer as the easily vanquished rabble of Slivnica, but as a virile and progressive peasant State, possessors of military talent of a very high order. Throughout the Southern Slav world Kumanovo was hailed^ as having avenged Kosovo and the fall of tlie me diaeval Serbian Empire.": .The Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes of Au tria- Hungary were carried off their THE IDEA OF SOUTHERN SLAV UNITY 103 feet by a wave of enthusiasm for the Balkan Allies. A Catholic Croat bishop in Dalmatia, when he heard the news, recited the Niinc Diiiiittis. One of the leaders of the Dalmatian Clericals, who less than ten years ago were violently anti-Serb, declared on a public platform that " in the Balkan sun we see the dawn of our day." A well-known Croat lawyer, now in an Austrian prison, assured me that the issue of the Balkan War had restored to the Southern Slavs their half-lost faith in themselves and in their national future. The peasants of the Dalmatian and Croatian uplands scraped together their last pennies for the Red Cross Funds of their " brothers " in Serbia. Many students smuggled them- selves across the frontier and fought as volunteers in the Serbian army, among them, to my knowledge, youths who a few years before had been active Clericals and anti-Serbs. For three weeks the Southern Slav population were allowed by the authorities to vent their delight in demonstrations, notably as the Montenegrin reservists passed down the Dalmatian coast. Then as the Serbian army began to approach the Adriatic, after two wonderful forced marches over the pathless and snow-covered Albanian mountains, the attitude of the Austro-Hun- garian Government stiffened ; mobilization was ordered, and the Press of Vienna and Budapest was filled with violent and obviously inspired attacks upon Serbia. These attacks centred round the legend of the Consul Prochaska in Prizren. For over a fortnight it was announced by all the leading newspapers in varying keys of indignation, on the basis of information sup- plied by Count Forgach and his colleagues in the Ballplatz, and genuinely believed by public opinion in the Monarchy, that the Consul had been shamefully insulted and even mutilated by the Serbs after their occupation of Prizren. After a certain interval of 104 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR time Prochaska returned unharmed to Vienna, and six months later he assured a colleague in the consular service, who repeated the statement to a distinguished Austrian historian, that nothing whatever had happened to him at Prizren, and that he had himself received orders from his Government to " make " an incident with the Serbs. A minor legend received great pro- minence in the Viennese Clerical organ Reichspost, to the effect that the well-known Albanian leader, Isa Boletinac, had been treacherously murdered during a conference by General Zivkovic, the com- mander of the Second Serbian Army. Among other lurid details the general was alleged to have shot him down with his own revolver. In point of fact, Isa and Zivkovic never met. Austria- Hungary was unquestionably contemplat- ing an attack upon Serbia, and it is still too soon to affirm positively the causes which led her at the last moment to abstain, though there are reasons for believing that Italy made full use of the position, which a clause in the Triple Alliance assured to her, to restrain her ally, and that Germany also at this time, as at the peace of Bucarest nine months later, opposed the outbreak of a war for which she was still not quite ready. It is also possible that the German Foreign Secretary, Herr von Kiderlen- Waechter, who did not die till the last day of the year, was genuinely desirous of maintaining peace. It is notorious that the highest military authorities in Austria-Hungary were eager for war both with Serbia and Russia, and during December 191 2 the War Office in Vienna opened a list for the registration of correspondents of foreign newspapers who would be allowed to follow the Austrian army in the projected Polish campaign. About the same time the chief of the Austro-Hungarian General Staff, Baron Konrad THE IDEA OF SOUTHERN SLAV UNITY 105 von Hoetzendorff, sent one of his officers to ascertain the opinion of Mr. Steed — who as Tunes correspon- dent in Vienna had won for himself the widest recognition as a profound student of Austrian affairs — upon the expediency of an immediate attack upon the Slav powers. When Mr. Steed pointed out the grave risks of such a policy, in view of the intensity of Slav feeling inside the Monarchy, his interrogator voiced the feelings of his chief, that such risks were worth taking by Austria, and that at the worst they would perish gloriously (glorreich luitergeheii). Here, again, it is possible that the army contracts commis- sion scandal which led to the fall of the Joint Minister of War, General Auffenberg, acted as a deterrent upon the war party. Meanwhile all overtures from Belgrade were always contemptuously rejected by the Ballplatz. At the height of the Balkan crisis three prominent Austrian politicians visited Belgrade with the definite object of promoting an understanding, though without any formal authority from Vienna ; and one of them, who enjoyed the confidence of almost all Southern Slavs, was empowered by the Premier, Mr. Pa§i(5, to put forward such far-reaching propositions on the part of the Serbian Government as would have revo- lutionized the whole relations of the Monarchy with her Balkan neighbours. These proposals included the promise not only of railway, road, and bridge concessions throughout the new Serbian territory to Austrian capitalists, but even the pledge of the " most- favoured-nation " clause in the next commercial treaty. Count Berchtold's attitude towards these advances, combined with the scandals of the Prochaska affair and the actively Serbophobe attitude of Count Forg^ch, Baron Macchio, and their colleagues in the Ballplatz, forced Mr. Pasi6 to the conclusion that friendship with Austria-Hungary was well-nigh im- 106 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR possible, and greatly strengthened the influence of that arch-intriguer Mr. Hartwig, the Russian minister in Belgrade. In the long run Austria-Hungary raised no obstacle to the peace negotiations of London nor to the Conference of Ambassadors, though the Germans skilfully manoeuvred the Entente into a minority by inducing Sir Edward Grey to accept the chairmanship of the latter. Meanwhile there was a new and increasingly un- friendly regime in the Southern Slav provinces. The Cuvaj dictatorship continued in Croatia, and indeed was carried to such lengths that collections for the Balkan Red Cross Societies were actually prohibited in Bosnia, owing to its proximity to the seat of war. A virtual state of siege prevailed in Dalmatia. All demonstrations were suddenly forbidden. Students and workmen were arrested for singing the Serbian or Bulgarian anthems in the street. Children were forbidden to wear popular sailor hats with the names of Balkan battles inscribed upon the ribbon. The project of offering free lodgings to wounded Serbian officers in Abbazia and other Adriatic health resorts was vetoed by the authorities. Finally on November 2oth the town councils of Split (Spalato) and Sibenik (Sebenico) were dissolved as a punishment for their demonstration, and the mayor of the former town was prosecuted on a charge of employing treasonable phrases in a public speech. By the transference of the trial to Klagenfurt, an open affront was put upon the Dalmatian courts, as though, being composed of Croats, they could not be expected to pronounce a fair decision. Yet in Klagenfurt, that centre of German- National and anti-Slovene agitation, the case broke down and Mr. Katalinid was triumphantly acquitted. The only effect of these and similar repressive measures was that four days after the dissolution the THE IDEA OF SOUTHERN SLAY UNITY 107 leaders of all the Croat and Serb parties in Dalmatia, representing 96 per cent, of the population, met in Zara to protest publicly against "the attempt of the Government to involve our people in a civil war" (that is, with Serbia) and against "the anti-national police system " in Dalmatia. All the most prominent politicians in the province thus united in a public and overwhelming expression of sympathy with Serbia and the idea of Southern Slav unity ; the repeated confiscations of the Dalmatian Press only intensified the general resentment. When I reached Ragusa in April 1913, after an absence of about a year, I was greeted by one of the leading Croat poets, now in an Austrian prison, as Rip van Winkle. As he very rightly said, public feeling had advanced a whole generation in a few short months, and I could scarcely recognize my best friends. It is worth while dwelling upon such details, because they serve to explain the atmosphere of the eventful years 1913-14. Above all, the students were in a highly excitable mood, full of unrest and discontent, not only with the general situation of the Southern Slavs in Austria-Hungary, but also with their own parties and leaders, as too slow and cautious in their methods. The spirit of the Italian risorgimento was abroad among them. For it is worth remembering that while the Italians themselves have long since entered a new stage of development in which economic and imperial interests play a consider- able part, the inspiration and influence of Mazzini and Foscolo, of Mamoli and Manin, is still alive among the Croats and Serbs of the coast, even among those who have fewest sympathies with the Italy of to-day. In 1913-14, then, there was a growing move- ment among the students and gymnasiasts in favour of the formation of a new forward party ; and while the wiser heads among them began to publish weekly 108 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR and monthly periodicals in Zagreb, in Zara, and in Prague, the extreme wing dabbled in new ideas and became infected by the anarchist theories of Proudhon and Bakunin and the "propaganda of the deed." The events of 1913 finally alienated Southern Slav public opinion from Austria and created fierce resent- ment and dissatisfaction. While Serbia had restored the mediaeval empire of Tsar Dusan, Austria-Hungary had vetoed her natural expansion to the sea, had in- sisted upon the creation of a puppet Albanian state, and had finally imposed her will by the menace of armed intervention. Worse still, Austria-Hungary had actively incited Bulgaria against Serbia, and had thus engineered the collapse of the short-lived Balkan League. The first indications of this were the visit of Dr. Danev, at that time President of the Bulgarian Chamber, to Vienna and Budapest to solicit help from the Dual Monarchy, and his secret intrigue behind t^ie back of his Serbian colleagues at the peace conference in London to secure the town of Dibra for Bulgaria and consequently the junction of the Bulgarian and Albanian frontiers. The final indication was the notorious speech of the Hungarian Premier, Count Tisza, in June 1913, in which he openly incited Bul- garia to enforce her claims against the allies of yester- day. It is an open secret that the treacherous night attack which ushered in the second Balkan war was the joint work of King Ferdinand, General Savov, and Count Tarnowski, the Austro-Hungarian Minister in Sofia. An interesting comment on this fact is the statement of Sir Edward Grey in the House of Commons on November 11, 1915, that "the German and Austrian sympathies of the King of the Bulgarians have always been known " — a fact which did not prevent the statesmen of the Entente from treating Bulgaria as a potential ally, even after Mackensen had THE IDEA OF SOUTHERN SLAV UNITY 109 opened his campaign on the Danube and the Bulgarian army was being massed on the Serbian frontier. The future historian will have much to say regarding the negotiations entered upon by King Ferdinand with Vienna and Budapest : first in September 1908, on the eve of the parallel proclamation of Bulgarian Inde- pendence and of the annexation of Bosnia ; second in June 1913, on the eve of the Bulgarian attack upon Serbia and Greece ; and finally in March or April 1915, after the allied Governments had ignored his overtures to intervene on their side. The second Balkan war ended the short but eventful period of Balkan unity. It left the Serbs deprived of that access to the sea to which they had aspired, and exhausted by the losses of two campaigns, but elated by victory, conscious of their national mission and recognized as liberators by the entire race. The lead which Austria might have acquired (or retained) among the Southern Slavs as a whole, by directing Croatian national aspirations into the right channels, and by pursuing a friendly policy towards Serbia, had been wrested from her by Serbia as the result of the Balkan wars. In Austria, as distinguished from Austria-Hungary, there had always been a considerable group which favoured the solution of the Southern Slav question on an Austrian basis ; the leader of the group was no other than the late Archduke Francis Ferdinand. The common definition of the pro- gramme as "Trialism" is extremely misleading; for to make three states out of the existing two would have only added to the complication and confusion, and Francis Ferdinand never contemplated such a step. He definitely aimed at upsetting the Dual System, but the system which he proposed to sub- stitute for it would have been a blend of centralism and federalism, intended to encourage local indivi- 110 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR duality, while unifying the executive forces of the Monarchy. Under it all the Southern Slavs would have formed a single unit with their own parliament at Zagreb — hence the application of the term "Trialism" to the Archduke's ideas — but there would have been one central parliament for the whole Monarchy. Francis Ferdinand has always been a great note of interrogation in the history of the eventful decade which preceded the war. As his uncle grew older, his influence steadily increased and he asserted him- self in many ways, often as the result of acute friction with the Emperor. For some years before his death the control of the army was virtually in his hands, and he was responsible for many military reforms. But he was never allowed to exercise any real power in Hun- garian affairs ; these Francis Joseph kept resolutely in his own hands. Hence Francis Ferdinand remained impotent to control the situation in Croatia and its bearing upon the Southern Slav Question as a whole. On at least two occasions he made very violent protests at the Hofburg against the Cuvaj regime, but without effect. Francis Ferdinand was popularly regarded as a Clerical and, indeed, as a keen Ultramontane ; but though this was true of his wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg, he himself was nothing more than a devout and practising Catholic, and instances could easily be cited of his tolerant interest alike in Pro- testant and Orthodox. His central political idea was detestation of the Magyar, as the chief danger to the Monarchy and the dynasty and as a formidable obstacle to the reconstruction of which he dreamed. At a private audience only a year before his death he said to a political acquaintance of the present writer, in reference to the Magyars, " It was bad taste on their part ever to come to Europe " {Es THE IDEA OF SOUTHERN SLAV UNITY 111 war eine Geschuiacklosigkeit von den Herren, dass sie i'lherhanpt nach Eiiropa gckonunen sind). He was genuinely in sympathy with the nationaHties of Hungary, especially the Slovaks and Roumanians, and fully understood their situation and aspirations ; and non-Magyars whom he more than once received have told me of the frank and spontaneous manner in which he recognized their sufferings and the in- evitable strain upon their loyalty to a dynasty which had done nothing for the past two generations to protect them against Magyar tyranny. It is neces- sary to add that he also sympathized quite genuinely with the Southern Slavs ; but here he made a fatal mistake in wishing to solve the problem on a purely Croat and Catholic basis to the detriment of the Serbs, and not, as justice demanded, on a basis of equality between Croat and Serb. During the last days of his life his ideas had crystallized, and his designs for a reconstruction of the Monarchy had taken concrete form on paper ; while a band of able lieutenants, drawn from the political and in- tellectual world and from the highest Austrian aris- tocracy, was ready to rally round him in this work whenever the moment should arrive. On the very eve of war I learnt from a sure source that the day after the murder in Sarajevo the Archduke's desks at home were searched for these documents, but they were not found. Till long afterwards I, as also my informant at the time, assumed this fact, which I know to be authentic, to refer to those designs of internal reconstruction to which allusion has already been made. But a new interpretation is put upon it by the extremely important and sensa- tional article recently published by Mr. Steed on "The Pact of Konopisht." ^ According to the in- • Nineteenth Century, February 1916. 112 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR formation upon which this article is based — and anything from the pen of Mr. Steed deserves the most serious consideration — an arrangement was reached during William ll's visit to Francis Ferdi- nand at his Bohemian castle in June 1914, by which the whole map of Europe was to be reconstructed ; the German hereditary provinces of the House of Habsburg united to Germany ; the Poland of the Jagellons, stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, to be revived for the Archduke's eldest son, while for his younger son was reserved a recon- structed federal state, including Bohemia, Hungary, and all the Southern Slav countries from Carniola to Salonica. If there be any truth in this extra- ordinary story, the search for documents in the Archduke's bureau, and the similar search said to have been made by General Potiorek in the pockets of the murdered man at Sarajevo, would be amply explained ; and if it be further true that these searches were due to a discovery of the project by the Austrian imperial family, this would go a long way towards explaining certain circumstances of the murder and the funeral. The murder of the Archduke and his wife is, and is likely to remain, wrapped in profound mystery. From the many sinister incidents of which that tragedy is composed three certain facts emerge : that no proper precautions were taken by the authorities to protect the Archduke and his wife in a town which swarms with political agents, and in which it is virtually impossible for any stranger to move a hundred yards without being under observation ; that one of the assassins was the son of a Bosnian police spy whom the Serbian authorities had desired to expel from Belgrade as a suspicious character, but for whom the Austro-Hungarian consulate vouched j THE IDEA OF SOUTHERN SLAV UNITY 113 and that the extensive anti-Serb riots in Sarajevo after the murder were carried out in an organized and methodical manner by the riff-raff of the town, while the police and the troops looked on and deliberately refrained from interfering till the follow- ing day, by which time most of the Serbian institu- tions of the town had been effectively sacked. It would require the pen of a great dramatist to do full justice to the tragic indignities of the murdered Archduke's funeral progress, and to the final pro- cession amid one of the most terrific thunderstorms of recent times, from the little railway station of Pochlarn across the Danube ferry to the solitary burial vault of Artstetten. The murder provided an admirable pretext for aggression. The psychological effect of so dastardly a deed was to unite many discordant elements in anger and revenge, and to revive all the latent preju- dice 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. The incentive to the crime came from within the Mon- archy, from the intolerable misrule of the Magyars, aggravated by Viennese connivance. The atmosphere of universal and growing discontent which I have attempted briefly to analyse above, amply suffices to explain the explosion. Though Belgrade, like all other Balkan capitals, contains anarchical and revolu- tionary elements eager to make mischief across the frontiers, the complicity of official Serbia is rendered incredible by urgent considerations of internal poli- tics. After a long and delicate negotiation, the Con- cordat with the Vatican had just been signed the week before. The Orient Railway question had reached a critical stage. A general election was pending, and 8 114 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR most of the cabinet were absent in their constitu- encies. A customs and mihtary union between Serbia and Montenegro was on the point of being proclaimed, and there was even a prospect of a final arrangement regarding the mutual relations of the KaragjorgjevicJ and Petrovic dynasties. Above all, the country was exhausted and eager for peace after the recent strain of two foreign wars and a formidable Albanian insur- rection ; and the autumn of 1914 was to reveal how lacking the Serbs were in the first necessities of a campaign. In other words, in the absence of positive proof, the presumption would be in favour of aggres- sion from Vienna to prevent Serbian consolidation, rather than in favour of a criminal provocation of the Habsburg Monarchy from Belgrade. The Austro-Hungarian Note to Serbia is susceptible of only one interpretation ; it was deliberately couched in such terms as to be unacceptable. No possible loophole was left by which Serbia could save her self- respect or prestige. And yet the impossible happened, and Serbia accepted the most galling of the demands made upon her, merely making certain reservations on two out of the ten chief points, without expressly rejecting even them. Not content with this humiliat- ing submission, the Serbian Government, three days later, through the medium of its representative in Rome, informed the Italian Foreign Minister that it was actually prepared to accept the whole Note if only "some explanation were given regarding the mode in which Austrian agents were required to intervene," and even went so far as to offer to accept these explanations from a third party if Austria-Hungary was not disposed to give them to Serbia direct.^ The best proof, however, of Serbia's conciliatory attitude lies in her offer to submit any points not fully met in ' White Paper, No. 64. THE IDEA OF SOUTHERN SLAV UNITY 115 her reply to the decision of the Hague Tribunal, where there would obviously have been little sympathy for terrorist conspiracies, or to that of the Powers who had dictated the terms of her surrender to Austria- Hungary in March 1909,1 That Austria-Hungary was not satisfied with so abject a surrender shows that war had been resolved upon from the first. The best proof of this is the inclusion of a time-limit of forty-eight hours, a step which paralysed all efforts towards peace and was directly responsible for the catastrophe which has over- taken Europe. It is impossible to resist the conclusion that Berlin shares with Vienna the responsibility for this time-limit ; and this is further strengthened by the frank admission of the Gernian White Paper that Germany " gave Austria an entirely free hand against Serbia." 2 The Note was the joint work of Count Tisza, Count Forgach, and Herr von Tschirschky, and evidence exists to show that it was submitted to the German Emperor before presentation. Austria-Hungary based her case upon a Note dis- claimmg all interest in Bosnia, which had been pre- sented through the medium of the Great Powers and accepted by Serbia in March 1909. If that precedent was worth anything, Austria- Hungary obviously ought to have invited once more the good offices of those same Powers, and the fact that she refrained from doing so is almost certainly due to German influence. Germany, in contending tb.at Austria-Hungary could not go before an European tribunal, was not merely • White Paper, No. 39. " The German White Paper was not, like the English one, a fairly complete collection of the dispatches which passed during the negotiations, but a statement of German policy with a few supporting documents. It was laid before the Reichstag on August 4th. 116 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR ignoring the part played by other Powers in 1909, but also the all-important precedent of the Dogger Bank.^ The Agram and Friedjung trials, 2 and the scandals connected with the names of Nasti(i, Vasid, and For- gach, provide the real explanation why Austria-Hun- gary was disinclined to go to The Hague ; and when the war is over other and weightier reasons will prob- ably transpire. The dossier appended to the Note and submitted as its justification to the representatives of the Great Powers was, to say the least, suspect, since it rested upon a one-sided and secret investiga- tion conducted in the prison of Sarajevo. The attitude of the outside world could not have been better summed up than by Sir Edward Grey in the opening document of his memorable White Paper, in which he assumed that the Austrian Govern- ment " would not do anything until they had first disclosed to the public their case against Serbia, founded presumably upon what they discovered at the trial." As a matter of fact, the trial did not commence until November 1914, and was conducted on the well-known lines of similar political trials in Bosnia and Croatia. The two murderers, being under age, could not legally be executed, but were sentenced to penal servitude, and one of them has since died ' It will be remembered that the Russian Baltic Fleet fired on some British trawlers in the North Sea at the outset of its voyage to the Far East during the Russo-Japanese War. The incident brought the two countries to the verge of war, but was satisfac- torily disposed of by the agreement of the two Powers to submit their differences to the Hague Tribunal. ' At the Friedjung trial Dr. Spalajkovic, in the name of the Serbian Government, formally offered to submit the whole case to the Hague Tribunal. The anxiety and disfavour with which this proposal was greeted in Vienna was very marked, and betrayed itself especially in the attitude of the presiding judge and of the semi-official inspired Press. THE IDEA OF SOUTHERN SLAV UNITY 117 in prison. Five of their alleged accomplices were executed. Thus it is more than doubtful whether the true facts of their conspiracy will ever be known. The diplomatic correspondence issued by the British Government in August 1914 shows it to have assumed an entirely detached attitude towards the Austro-Serbian conflict, and to have disclaimed all concern with the merits of the dispute. But though the circumstances of the case do not justify us in a severe criticism of such an attitude, it may fairly be treated as further evidence of the fact which the events of last autumn finally proved, that London had no conception of Serbia's role in Europe, especially during an European war. In July 1914 the British ambassador in Petrograd, apparently acting upon instructions from home, pointed out to M. Sazonov that "direct British interests in Serbia are nil," and two days later Sir Edward Grey, in acknowledging the ambassador's report of this conversation, said : " I entirely approve of what you said." ^ What must the German Govern- ment have thought when reading this strange admission of British blindness? To-day it has become apparent even to the " man in the street " that the true inner meaning of the attack upon Serbia lies in her position as the holder of the gate which secures to the Central Powers access to Con- stantinople and to Salonica. Without the aid of Serbia there can be no land barrier to the German Drang nach Ostcn, and British statesmen have the choice of restoring and strengthening Serbia to the utmost possible limit, or of accepting the Pan-German design of " Berlin-Bagdad " as inevitable. Serbia is one of the pivots of our Continental policy, and the erection of a strong and unified Southern Slav state ' White Paper, Nos. 6 and 24. 118 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR upon the Eastern Adriatic, linked in close friendship with Italy and Roumania, is one of the most vital of British interests in this war. It is to be hoped that a just Nemesis will ere long overtake the statesmen who, so far from realizing this elementary truth, steadily refused to avow Serbia as their ally, secretly bartered away the dearest possessions of her race, withheld the military aid which would have prevented Germany from conquering the Balkans and ensured the entry of Roumania, and at last were too late to save her at the moment of her death agony. The paramount aim of Serbia in this war is easily defined. It consists not in the conquest of neigh- bouring territory nor in the acquisition of an access to the sea, on the basis of the old Metternichian policy of " compensation," but rather in the complete uni- fication of the Southern Slav race — of Serb, Croat, and Slovene alike — within the framework of a single State. Such was the programme proclaimed by Serbia's veteran Premier, Mr. Pasic, in the Skup:5tina in November 1914, when his country's fortunes seemed desperate and the Austrian army was already threatening Kragujevac. Such was the programme clearly expressed in the manifesto addressed in May 191 5 to the British nation by the Jugoslav Committee, which is composed of prominent representatives of all parties in the Southern Slav provinces of Austria- Hungary. Such, too, was the programme to which in exile the Serbian Premier and the Serbian Prince- Regent once more solemnly expressed their adhesion. In receiving an important British deputation, headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs, the Vice-Chancellor of the University, and many members of Parliament and leading jour- nalists. Prince Alexander said that his "ideal is the union in one single fatherland of all the Serbs, THE IDEA OF SOUTHERN SLAV UNITY 119 Croats, and Slovenes, who are one people with the same traditions, the same tongue, the same tendencies, but whom an evil fate has divided." Henceforth the Karagjorgjevic dynasty is identified with the Jugoslav ideal, and with it must stand or fall. When war broke out the leaders of Southern Slav opinion in Dalmatia, Croatia, and Bosnia, and indeed many of the clergy, schoolmasters, and municipal officials, were either arrested, interned, or placed under close observation. Attempts were made to induce the parties to issue a loyal address to the Emperor, but as in Bohemia so also in Croatia and Dalmatia, these attempts were unavailing. Those who by a fortunate accident were abroad at the outbreak of hostilities, or succeeded in crossing the frontier in the early days of the war, included some of the best known Croat politicians, notably Dr. Trumbid and Mr. Supilo, two of the makers of the Resolution of Fiume, and Dr. Hinkovic, the chief counsel for the defence in the Agram treason trial. The Jugoslav Committee formed under their auspices includes two names of more than local fame — Ivan Mestrovic, the Rodin of the Slavonic world, and Michael Pupin, the famous Serb-American scientist, whose experi- ments have made long-distance telephony possible. When this Committee issued its manifesto in London, Count Tisza, the Hungarian Premier, brought strong pressure to bear upon the leaders of the Croatian Diet to disavow or repudiate the action of their com- patriots in exile : yet not merely no party, but not even any individual member of a party, not even of the former Serbophobe fraction, could be induced to do so. No more significant proof could be furnished of the fact that the programme of Jugoslav Unity represents the ideal of the overwhelming majority of the Serbo-Croat and Slovene race. 120 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR In the German edition of my book on "The Southern Slav Question," published in the spring of 1913, I wrote as follows : " Serbo-Croat Unity will and must come. Austria has the choice of delaying its attainment for a generation and reaping the fruits of so fatal a policy, or of encouraging the aspirations of the Southern Slavs and so restoring Austrian influence in the Northern Balkans on the pillars of sympathy and common interests. History teaches that certain States are offered a leading part by the elemental force of circumstances ; those who reject it or prove unworthy are trodden mercilessly underfoot. The near future will prove whether Austria possesses the moral strength to solve the problem of Serbo- Croat Unity and to force Hungary to a radical re- vision of her racial policy, or whether she will be untrue to her historical mission and thinks of abdi- cating in favour of the Serbian, Roumanian, and Bulgarian national States. This alternative is an especial concern of Germany, for she might easily find herself in the position of paying the political debts of Austria." At that time it was still possible for me to plead the cause of Southern Slav Unity in an Austrophil sense ; for I felt profoundly convinced that such a solution of the Southern Slav problem was the sole alternative to an European cataclysm. To-day it is not illogical to plead the same cause in a Serbophil sense ; for the long-feared cataclysm has come upon us, and under the utterly altered circum- stances of the present I feel as profoundly convinced that such a solution is the sole guarantee of future peace on the Adriatic and in the Balkan Peninsula. I have the less hesitation in proclaiming my con- victions, because it is becoming increasingly obvious that the creation of a strong and united Southern Slav state is an eminently British interest. PART II THE PAN-GERMAN PLAN CHAPTER VI "CENTRAL EUROPE" AND "BERLIN-BAGDAD" It has become a commonplace of writers on the war to say that Germany is a danger to Europe. In a sense this is of course true, but it gives a wrong focus to the truth. For no nation, so long as it is content with its national unity and independence and the development of its own resources and culture, can fairly be described as a menace to its neighbours. That stage is only reached when it begins to regard its own civilization as a species of superculture, and its leaders as supermen who have the mission of imposing their wishes and ideas upon the outside world. It is not, then, Germany, as Germany^ that threatens Europe's whole future. There have been cases before in history, when a great nation went mad for a time and yet recovered from its madness. The classic example is that of our nearest and dearest allies, the French, during the orgies of the Reign of Terror. And it may be that in the same way Germany will recover from the madness which has devastated Belgium, Poland, and Serbia, and that some inter- course between her and her neighbours to the West and East will again be possible. At a moment when her submarines and Zeppelins are murdering at 121 122 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR random, and her soldiers are drugged with ether for the assault, this may appear little better than a pious hope. But to-day the essential fact with which we have to reckon is that Germany is more united than ever before, and that the classes which control her des- tinies — not merely the narrow military clique at the top, but the whole vast organism of the bureaucracy, army, and professional and academic classes — are inspired by a programme which may be summed up in three words — Deutschland i'tber Alles, Fortunately this has at last become too obvious to be ignored, and is, indeed, only contested by a few cranks, who have been far too often wrong in their estimates and pro- phecies to obtain credence now. Strangely enough, however, the real urgent menace from Germany has been, to a large extent, overlooked by our public opinion or merely alluded to in passing. This menace lies in the fact that Germany controls the destinies of the 51,000,000 who inhabit the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy — to say nothing of the 20,000,000 of Turkey and the 4,000,000 of Bulgaria — and is ruthlessly ex- ploiting them in a cause which the vast majority of them regard with complete indifference, and at least half of them with utter loathing. Just as the harmless Anatolian peasant is fighting the battles of Enver Pasha — the murderer of his commander-in-chief, his Grand Vizier, and now his Heir-Apparent — so the 35,000,000 Slavs and Latins of the Central Empires are being used as " food for cannon " in a death- struggle against their own kinsmen and their dearest national ideals. Thus the main task before us, if we are really to reconstruct Europe on new and healthy lines, must be to detach these peoples from their present thraldom to Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest, "CENTRAL EUROPE" 123 to liberate the Slav democracies of Central Europe, and to secure to them the means of progress and organization upon a national and independent basis. This task has the further military advantage that it enables us to attack Germany at her weakest, and no longer at her strongest, spot ; for the events of the war have only served to prove that some of the leading French strategists were right in maintaining that the true field for a successful offensive lies through the great Hungarian plains, not through the brick walls of Belgium. By our planlessness and levity we have abandoned the magnificent natural frontier from the Adriatic to the Danube, which was at our disposal for the first fourteen months of the war, and we did not even take the trouble to defend Mount Lovcen, the key of the Adriatic, from the assaults of Austria. But though our folly has made the task infinitely more difficult, it still lies before us. If to the conquering Germans last autumn Serbia was the route to the East, she is also the route to the West for the Allied armies. Before the war in Germany, as in all other European countries, our own included, there were two currents of opinion, the one definitely opposed to adventure or expansion, the other as definitely basing itself upon force as the root of all progress. No one who visited Germany frequently, or was in the habit of reading German political literature, could fail to be aware of the existence of an active Pan-German movement and of a propaganda which often assumed an anti-British complexion. Our mistake lay in over-estimating the strength of those saner forces in German public opinion which made for peace. At the end of July 1914 those forces proved themselves to be utterly impotent, and were swept away by the march of 124 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR events. The inevitable result has been to bring the Pan-German programme within the range of prac- tical politics and to increase immensely its appeal and its popularity. It may be argued that we were always wrong to ignore its significance ; to-day our most vital interests demand that we should study it in all its bearings. There are three stages in the Pan-German plan : (i) The creation of " Mitteleuropa," a great Central European state-organism of 130 to 150 million in- habitants, as an economic and military unit ; (2) the realization of the dream Berlin-Bagdad, by the inclu- sion in the political and economic spheres of influence of the new Zollverein of all the territory lying between the Hungarian frontier and the Persian Gulf ; and (3) naval supremacy and Weltmacht. The vital prob- lem of this war, upon which the whole future develop- ment of civilization depends, is whether we are to oppose this programme or to submit to it as inevitable. At such a moment there can be no half-measures ; the answer must be yes or no. If no, this war is an act of criminal folly which has no parallel in history. If yes, we must not wait till the enemy's plan has reached maturity, but must overthrow it in its initial stages. It was a German poet who told us that what we have inherited from our ancestors we must earn again in order to possess {Was dii ercrbt von dclnen Vdtern hast, erwirb es, um es zu besitzcn). That is a lesson which we have been in danger of forgetting, and which Germany is teaching us. For the future we must throw off the insularity which left us ignorant or oblivious of hostile designs, nor must we ever allow a situation to arise in which we might seem indifferent to events upon land, simply because they take place at the other end of Europe. For such indifference is the "CENTRAL EUROPE" 125 surest way to alienate our Allies, who realize to the full the close interconnection of West and East and South- east, and expect us to realize it equally. If we are right in regarding sea power as the key to victory, it is none the less true that the extension of German land power will be the prelude to a fresh attempt to chal- lenge our security on the sea. That is, of course, the true inward explanation of the presence of British armies upon French soil ; but while every one to-day realizes the need of countering the German land plan on the West, the equally urgent and overwhelming need of countering the Germans in the East of Europe has still not been sufficiently realized. There are still quite serious and well-meaning people who argue that if the Germans could once be ejected from Belgium and Northern France, our aims in the war would be achieved. To them all the vast problems of Central and Eastern Europe are a mere blank. In seeking to differentiate between Germany and her Allies, they fail to realize the fact that it is no mere accident that has brought Prussia, Hungary, Turkey, and Bulgaria into line. All four stand for the same principle of racial hegemony. The only difference lies in the varying degree of crudeness with which that policy is pursued in Posen, in Transylvania, in the Balkans, and in Armenia. If the German plan of " Berlin-Bagdad " is to be countered, we must find obstacles to place in its path, and in so doing we can only build with the material which is already to our hand. This consists, above all, of the Slav and Latin peoples of Austria-Hungary and South-eastern Europe generally, who are eager to lead their own national lives, and the fulfilment of whose aspirations coincides absolutely with British interests and the interests of the Entente as a whole. Till the 126 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR very eve of war, and even later, it was the fashion in certain circles to regret our political ties with Russia on the ground that the Slavs are barbarous. It would be as easy as it is superfluous to prove that the Russians, the greatest of all the Slav nations, are anything but barbarous, and that they have much to teach us all — above all, the Kulturvolk pay excellence — in every branch of science, art, literature, and music. But my present object is to emphasize that it is an equally gross libel, and in some directions an even grosser libel, upon the other Slav nations also. The next two in importance, the Poles and the Czechs, far from being barbarous, have ancient cultures and literatures of their own, and have played a notable part in European thought and progress. The Slovaks are perhaps the most attractive and naturally gifted of all the Slav nations, and only await the removal of the tyrannous Magyar yoke in order to reveal their latent talents to the world at large. The Serbs and their Croat and Slovene kinsmen, the three branches of the Jugoslav race, are also noticeable, not only for their heroic endurance against fearful odds, but above all for the virile perseverance which has created, without external aid, the most democratic of peasant states in modern times. One further point deserves special emphasis in this connection, namely, the essential error which underhiy our diplomacy in the years preceding the war, in treating the Balkans and Austria-Hungary as tv/o watertight compartments. It lies quite outside my present purpose to describe the process by which the Germany of the Burschenschaften and Turnvereine, of the Romantic Era in literature, and of liberalism in the Swabian and South German form, was transformed by the genius of Bismarck and his group into the "CENTRAL EUROPE" 127 Prussianized Germany against which we are pitted to-day, and which rests upon the material doctrines of blood and iron, and of brute force as the sure fore- runner of national prosperity. During the generation which separated the Congress of Vienna from the Revolution of 1848, the aspirations of the leaders of German thought were directed, at one and the same time, towards national unity and constitutional liberty and reform. But the reform movement was ship- wrecked at Frankfurt in 1848. Unity was only possible on a unitary basis. Two masters were im- possible ; either Prussia or Austria had to give way. The idealists of Frankfurt dreamed of a " Great Germany," the Germany of 70,000,000, as they reckoned even then. But the inclusion of Austria with her non-German elements would have created a dangerous dualism and prolonged still further the rivalry of Habsburg and Hohenzollern. Bismarck achieved German unity on rather narrower lines by the elimination of Austria. He achieved it in seven years by three successive wars of aggression, in which appearances were carefully preserved till long after the event. But for his remaining twenty years of office, with the notorious exception of 1875, when he was within an ace of attacking France once more, he favoured peaceful development, and posed as the peacemaker and honest broker. Nor was this a mere pose, and there are no grounds for doubting his sincerity when he applied the famous phrase " satiated " {satiiriert) to the territorial appetites of Germany, and when he declared that the whole Eastern Question was not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. The modern German tendency to repudiate his attitude in this respect has obscured the extremely subtle nature of his policy. The same attitude which, 128 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, made him He in despair upon his bed and tear the bedclothes with his teeth when his master wanted to annex Bohemia, was reflected in the memorandum which he addressed to WilHam I in 1871, to the effect that it was far more advantageous for Germany to extend her influence over the Slavs through the medium of Austria than to annex the German subjects of the House of Habsburg. A whole volume could easily be devoted to a discus- sion of his motives in 1866, in suggesting that Budapest was a better centre than Vienna for the reconstruction of the Dual Monarchy. But it is quite clear that he aimed at the political organization of Austria-Hungary as an instrument of German policy ; and with that aim always in view the Czechs were isolated, the Poles discreetly held in check, and the Magyars flattered and encouraged. So firmly per- suaded was Bismarck of Austria's value to Germany, that when the Eastern Question separated Austria from Russia and forced Bismarck to a decision, he chose Austria without hesitation. Thus arose the Dual Alliance, which in 1882 became the Triple Alliance. Throughout these years Bismarck favoured the league of the three Emperors, and sometimes managed to attain it, though never permanently ; and his leanings towards Russia, or the Tsarist system, led him to conclude the famous Reinsurance Treaty (Rilckver- sicherungsvertrag). But determined as he was to remain on friendly terms with Russia, he was never prepared to pay the price of deserting Austria. Bismarck's aim, then, was slow infiltration. He once said to Hermann Bahr, the novelist, who as a young man headed a deputation of Austrian students, "that he was glad to see that the German- Austrians were good Germans ; but that they could not prove this better than by making Austria strong. "CENTRAL EUROPE" 129 Germany needed them and reckoned upon them, but inside Austria." To-day we are beginning to see the meaning of this policy. On a similar occasion, in 1895, Bismarck said: "To prove effectually your sentiments towards the German Emperor, fulfil all your duties towards your own dynasty. I advise you to show condescension and indulgence to your Slav neighbours." In the same way he steadily discouraged politicil demonstrations directed against Austria, and in 1897 induced the Reichstag to reject a motion of sympathy with the German nationalists of Austria. In short, he desired a perpetual political alliance between Germany and Austria, if possible, leading to a ZoUverein, but very possibly nothing more. It is sometimes argued that because Germany's present-day ambitions follow quite naturally out of Bismarck's policy, therefore Bismarck was a Pan- German. That is as true and as false as to describe Drake or Nelson as an Imperialist ; for every man lives in his own age. It may be that his biographer, Erich Marcks, is right in claiming that Bismarck would be heart and soul with his people in their struggle to-day. But it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that Marcks and many of his compatriots feel, in their heart of hearts, that Bismarck would never have involved Germany in such a war. For to-day Germany is fighting at one and the same time the three wars which her Jingoes would have liked her to fight in succession — the war against Russia and Slavdom, for the domination of Middle Europe and the Near East ; the war against France, to silence the promptings of revanche and to win the mouths of the Scheldt and the Rhine ; and the war against Britain, for sea power and world dominion, Bismarck would certainly have taken them singly. There is another 9 130 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR direction, however, in which it is possible to trace the hand of Bismarck on the tragedy of to-day, in his poHcy of the " strong hand " against the Poles of Posen and Silesia. Despite his platonic advice to Austrian students, he pursued an anti-Slav policy in the most acute and irreconcilable form, and con- trived to combine it with a firm league with the Russian Court. Thus under Bismarck we find the curious paradox of Petrograd, inspired by German influence, following an anti-Slav policy in Poland, and thus weakening Russian prestige in the Slavonic world. The Polish partition is the great initial crime which lies at the root of all European troubles for a hundred and fifty years past, and which has com- mitted the three spoilers to the support of an evil situation. Now that Russia has broken with Germany, and is very slowly but noticeably preparing to atone for the crimes of the past, we have the right to expect a complete transformation of Russo- Polish relations, and consequently of the whole situation between the Baltic and the Danube. The eighties were a period of mild colonial expansion on the part of Germany, but it was not until the accession of William II that the new era can be said to have begun. Pan-Germanism raised its head and kept pace with the tremendous out- burst of economic activity and material prosperity. Weltpolitik (world policy) became the new cry, and William himself became its mouthpiece. In 1896, the year of the Kruger telegram, he made one of his most memorable speeches : " Out of the German Empire a world-empire has arisen. Everywhere in all parts of the earth thousands of our countrymen reside. German riches, German knowledge, German activity find their way across the ocean. The duty devolves on you to help me to knit this Greater "CENTRAL EUROPE" 131 German Empire close to the home country, by helping me in complete unity to fulfil my duty also to the Germans in foreign parts." Thus was inaugurated the new Imperialism. The motto of the Great Elector — " Remember that you are a German " (Gedenke dass du ein Deutscher bist) — became the motto of Emperor and people. What more natural and estimable than this encouragement of national sentiment ? How could we, who were at that very moment engaged in knitting our own Empire more closely together, venture to criticize the Emperor's attitude ? What more unexceptionable than William II's words, if they had been pronounced by a man of normal temper and not accompanied by a whole series of reactionary and arrogant utterances ? It is unnecessary to go through the long catalogue. "Sic volo, sic jiibeo." "Him who opposes me I will crush." "Our future lies on the water." "The trident must be in our hands." " The Emperor of the Atlantic greets the Emperor of the Pacific." " Peoples of Europe, guard your holiest possessions." " No quarter will be given, no prisoners will be taken. . . . Open up once for all a way for Kultur." The last two sentences, incredible as it may sound even to-day, belong to one and the same speech. In William II's unbalanced imagination a glorious ideal becomes raucous and rings false. The pure enthusiasm of the patriot soldier-poet, Theodor von Korner, who apostrophized the sword upon his thigh on the evening before he gave his life in the War of Liberation of 1813, becomes the nauseous military sentiment which makes the German Crown Prince proclaim his regret that a cavalry charge at manoeuvres is not the "real thing." The old idea that Germany is " satiated " comes to be more and more keenly repudiated, not only by the 132 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR Pan-German extremists, but by all the sanest and most influential political writers. We hear more and more of Kulturdiiuger ("the manure of culture") ; of the crude gospel of materialism ; of the doctrine of the superman and the " strong hand " ; of the supreme morality of war ; of military strategy as the basis of all political organism and of all international frontiers ; of the theory that small states cannot subsist and must inevitably become the prey of the great. That least aggressive and greatest of all German writers, Goethe, once declared that every man had the choice between becoming hammer or anvil. The Pan-Germans caught up this phrase, and preached the view that after being the anvil for centuries the German must insist upon becoming the hammer. The essence of these modern doctrines may be summed up in the teaching of Treitschke — " the State is Power." One of the main secrets of German success has been those habits of association and co-operation to which their mediaeval cities owed much of their prosperity. Just as the student societies played a predominant part in the War of Liberation, so the eighties and nineties which have led to the War of Hegemony, were a period of the foundation of every kind of patriotic and political society. In 1880 the Deutsche Schiilverein was founded in Vienna for the support of German schools, and in the following year its namesake in Berlin was established. The aims of these societies, which are still very active, though perhaps slightly less powerful since the year 1895, were by no means confined to preserving the German position in such mixed districts as Bohemia, Silesia, Posen, Hungary, and Styria, but also to propagating in the intensest manner possible the German idea all along the non-German borderland. An older society, the Gustav-Adolf-Verein, has devoted itself to the "CENTRAL EUROPE" 133 support of German Protestant congregations in diffi- culties, and has done splendid work against Magyar aggression ; but, despite its genuinely Protestant zeal, it must be regarded as an eminently political organ. The three colonial societies — the German Colonial League, the German Colonial Society, and the Society for German Colonization — have all exercised a very marked influence upon public opinion in Germany. The so-called Schutzvereine (Leagues of Defence), which sprang up in every direction throughout the Polish districts of Germany, the German and mixed districts of Bohemia, and the countries lying between Vienna and the Adriatic, have at one and the same time strengthened the German element wherever it was forced upon the defensive, and intensified the racial struggle by every kind of offensive tactics. Above all, the notorious Deutsche Ostmarkenverein (1894), which has acquired the nickname of the " Hakatist " League from the first letter of the names of its three founders, Hansemann, Kennemann, and Tiedemann, led a fierce and merciless attack upon everything Polish — schools, traditions, culture, religion — and became the foremost champion of the brutal policy of land expropriation pursued by the Prussian Government. There is, however, one society which has attained special notoriety and which deserves fuller treatment, because though often poohpoohed even by quite serious Germans before the war, and though always ahead of German public opinion, and indeed extrava- gant and fantastic in its aims and utterances, it has, in this present war, come into its own, and proved, not only to Germany but to all Europe, that its vapourings and frenzy are not merely Utopian, but Realpoliiik of the grimmest kind. This is the Pan- German League, which, first founded in 1886 by the 134 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR notorious Dr. Carl Peters as the Allgemeine Deutsche Verband, to encourage colonial expansion, was trans- formed in 1895 by Dr. Hasse, the deputy for Leipzig, into the Alldciitsche Verband. Its programme was one of expansion and dominion, of the community of all branches of the German race {Genieinschaft alter deiitscher Stdmme). It favoured the restoration of the ancient frontiers of the mediaeval Empire, the redemp- tion of all German outposts at the expense of the enemy at the gates, the consolidation of Central Europe on a Teutonic and at the same time on an economic basis. It worked through perpetual meet- ings and agitation, and the noisy cries of its platform orators were reflected in its official organ, the All- deutsche Blatter. It would be very easy even to-day to exaggerate its influence in the years preceding the war. But it certainly acted as a permanent stimulant to the Government, especially in matters of emigration and colonial expansion. Above all, it stirred up public opinion and accustomed it to think of world- problems which had hitherto lain outside the German ken. It would not be accurate to assert that William II encouraged the League, but he has always worked upon parallel lines. Another famous speech, delivered in 1898, in which he urged " the unity and co-opera- tion of all the German tribes," aroused special enthu- siasm in Pan-German circles owing to its use of the central phrase in the League's programme. The agitation of the Pan-German League unquestionably paved the way for the first Navy Bill and popularized the German fleet, especially in Bavaria and the south. Its programme may be summed up under three main heads. No German must be de-Germanized, or lost to his nationality ; the fleet must form the link with all Germans overseas ; and an active Pan-German propa- ganda must prepare the colonization of Central Europe. "CENTRAL EUROPE" 135 Before the war there was a widespread tendency in this country to speak of the Germans as incapable of colonization. This cheap contempt for a rival who has since become an active enemy is a very dangerous theory. It may be true enough of the particular territory acquired in Africa by the Prussianized Empire of the Hohenzollern ; but it is most emphati- cally not true as an historical statement. Indeed, the growth of such a theory is due to our neglect of European history, and of the racial facts which underlie and explain that history. The very name of Prussia is Slavonic. Berlin is built on territory once occupied by Wends, Obotrites, and other vanished Slav tribes. Pomerania, which derives its name from the Slav Pomorska (Shoreland), was only Germanized in the seventeenth century. The twin dynasties of Mecklenburg are purely Slav in origin. The Mark of Brandenburg is sprinkled with Slav names. East Prussia was Germanized by fire and sword by the Teutonic Knights and the Knights of the Sword, and as a result the Baltic provinces of Russia fell under the dominion of a German landed aristocracy, which retained its influence upon the Russian Court till the very eve of war. The great seaport of Riga has been a centre of German influence, and Dorpat University was purely German till less than a genera- tion ago. The name of Austria — Oesterreich — signifies the East Mark, the outpost of Germanism in its early struggles against Celt and Slav ; and much of the present German territory of Austria has only acquired its present racial character as the result of centuries of strife. Since the beginning of history Bohemia has been the battle-ground of Slav and Teuton, and a notable field of German colonization. In the north of Hungary ^there is scarcely a town which was not founded by German settlers and does not preserve 136 GERMAN, SLAY, AND MAGYAR to this day much of its German character. In Tran- sylvania the virile little Saxon colonies have preserved their national identity since the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In the kingdom of Himgary as a whole there are to-day over two million Germans. There are German colonists even in Roumania, in the delta of the Danube and in the northern valleys of Bosnia ; while in South Russia and the Caucasus they are numbered by the hundred thousand. Thus the Drang nach Osten, so far from being a new event in history, dates back eight centuries and more. It is a com- monplace to say that nationality in its modern sense is a very recent development ; but that does not mean that national consciousness was non-existent in earlier centuries. Even in this island, Scotland and Wales are a proof to the contrary. For a thousand years past a fierce racial struggle has raged between Germans and Slovenes in the Styrian Alps and the Karst, between Germans and Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia ; and since 1850 this struggle has been intensified tenfold. The present war is perhaps its supreme expression ; for it is essenti- ally a national war, upon whose issue will depend the future development of the Slav and Teutonic races. We must not, then, despise the Germans as colonists. They may not be suited for Africa or Australia ; but for Europe they most emphatically are. And if they are formidable to-day, it is, as we have seen, above all because they control the destinies of so many millions of alien race who are liable alike to military and eco- nomic exploitation, and may at any moment become the victims of a policy of assimilation and colonization. The only sure way to curb them, and to reduce them within reasonable limits, is to free from their control those other races which, though weaker, have an abso- "CENTRAL EUROPE" 137 lute right to as free an existence and development as the Germans themselves. Wars and revolutions are thought out in con spirators' garrets and in professors' studies and class-rooms. Mazzini made United Italy possible. Adam Smith laid the foundations of Britain's modern trade policy. Despite our many Empire builders, it was Dilke and Seeley who first taught us to think Imperially. In the same way, Treitschke and Sybel, List and Mommsen, kindled the modern Prussian tradition. Nowhere has the professor, and above all the historian, played the part of the prophet more effectually than in Germany. In the words of one of the ablest German political thinkers, Friedrich Nau- mann, " When I speak of the historian as the trainer for politics, I see on his right hand the philosopher and on his left the poet." The German national movement of a century igo is one from which no impartial student of history can refuse his sympathy and admiration ; and the figures of Stein as statesman, Fichte as philosopher, Arndt and Korner as poets, Jahn as organizer of patriotism, cannot be held responsible for their brutal and degenerate descendants. Unhappily, the dream of German unity was not to be realized by the admirable methods of South German liberalism, but by the blood and iron of the Prussian Junker. Our natural detestation for the one need not blind us to the merits of the other, as originally conceived ; but it is also necessary to point out that even among the idealists who gave to the War of Liberation its inspira- tion and its programme, the first traces of the modern Pan-German doctrine may be detected. Arndt re- garded the fate of small nations as sealed ; his whole outlook was vitiated by the theory that the Rhine from source to mouth is the heritage of Germany — a theory 138 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR which, of course, involves the disappearance of Hol- land and Switzerland. "The German," he argued, "warlike, enterprising, and resolute, has been created to co-operate in the domination of the world " ; and his natural mission is one of colonization. "Turn- vater" Jahn, whose influence upon the youth of Ger- many in the first half of the nineteenth century was incalculable, dreamt of banishing Austria and the Habsburgs to Belgrade and Semlin, and argued that the Pan-German capital must be erected "half-way between Geneva and Memel, between Trieste and Copenhagen, between Dunkirk and Sandomir." It was on this generous basis that he dreamt of erecting German unity. Parallel with the epoch-making work of Clausewitz, who placed the teachings of strategy upon a modern scientific basis, we find the less profound, but still highly significant writings of Dietrich von Biilow, who evolved an elaborate theory of political strategy as the true basis of all modern statecraft. His influence can be traced down to the present day, especially in two of his favourite contentions — that only offensive wars can hope to succeed, and that small states are doomed to inevitable extinction. One of the foremost links in the chain of Pan- Germanic doctrine was the famous economist Fried- rich List, who inspired that policy of economic union — or " Free trade within the Empire," to use a more modern phrase — which was a necessary preliminary to German unity in 1871. It was List who said, over two generations ago : " He who has no share in the seas is shut out from the good things and honours of this world. He is a stepson of God." He, like Treitschke after him, declared that Holland can only hope to regain even part of her former pros- perity by union with Germany. To him the " Con- "CENTRAL EUROPE" 139 tinental System " of Napoleon ceased to be a monstrous idea, if Germany, not France, could be made the centre of economic union. The Continent must be organized as a unit against Britain on the one hand and Russia on the other. It was List also who preached and fore- told a union of hearts between Germans and Magyars, and Turkey's destiny as the heritage of Germany. Another of the founders of modern Germany, Hellmuth von Moltke, as a young man travelled in the East, and resented the complete absence of German influence. In his writings he favoured the foundation of a German principality in Palestine, and expressed the hope "that Austria will maintain the rights and safeguard the future of the Danubian countries, and that Germany will finally succeed in liberating the mouths of her great rivers," i.e. the Rhine and the Danube. Here we already see the germ of " Berlin to Bagdad " in the earlier form of " Rotterdam to Constantinople." The literature of Pan-Germanism deserves closer attention than it has hitherto received in this country. I do not refer to such wild lucubrations as " Germania Triumphans," "The Reckoning with England," "The Coming War" ; for mountains of such trash have ap- peared during the last twenty years both in Germany and in England, and though not without a certain psychological effect upon the masses, need not be taken very seriously. Nor is it necessary to dwell upon the writings of General Bernhardi, Colonel Frobenius, and others who acquired a sudden notoriety on the declaration of war. Far more important, and yet almost unknown in England, is the figure of Paul Lagarde, who even before the war had come to be more and more recognized as the true spiritual father of Pan-Germanism. In private life, Lagarde was Pro- fessor of Oriental Languages at Gottingen, and a 140 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR scholar of high distinction, whose work marked an epoch in the study of the Septuagint and Greek patristic Hterature. But Lagarde's true significance Hes in the collection of " German Writings " {Deutsche Schriften), in which he concentrated his political creed. Compounded of a fervent Protestantism of the period which preceded David Friedrich Strauss, an uncompromising anti- Semitism, based upon an inversion of the New Testament, and an ultra-Conservative outlook upon social problems, he stated his main political thesis as follows in a letter of dedication to Prince William (now William II) in 1886 : " Little Germany is only to be regarded as a perhaps inevitable and necessary stage on the march towards Great Germany, just as the North German Confederation was a stage towards the present German Empire." In his view, the proper work for the German race was colonization : and the non-German districts of Austria-Hungary and Ger- many must be Germanized, if not even Prussianized. He accepted Italian unity, and looked upon Croatia and Serbia as capable of forming an independent State, " because inhabited by a homogeneous and cultivated population and contiguous with kindred tribes." ^ But the Turks, Magyars, and the whole Ural-Altaic stock are, he argues, played out ; while " Magyars, Czechs, and other such nationalities under the sceptre of Austria are a burden upon history, but can serve as the mortar for a nobler race." German colonization, then, must be conducted on a careful strategic plan, extending throughout the Polish, Slovak, C^zech, and Magyar territory. Germany must find new and strategically tenable frontiers, annexing on the west Alsace-Lorraine as far as the Argonne, and on the east Russian Poland as far as the Pinsk marshes. ' " Deutsche Schriften " (1886), p. 33. "CENTRAL EUROPE" 141 Under no circumstances must Germany's frontiers towards Austria ever become those of a hostile state. Central Europe (" Mitteleuropa "), then, must be regu- lated anew, as a pledge of peace : ^ an indissoluble offensive and defensive alliance must be followed by the Germanization of Austria. " They all " — Magyars, Czechs, Jews, etc. — " hate us, because they know that our life is their death, and that without us they cannot exist spiritually, and in spite of this they will not recog- nize our superiority." ^ In 1875 Lagarde was already urgently advocating a scheme of German colonization in Posen and West Prussia, " when not a soul in authority thought of the need for making a stand against the Slavs in the East"; while in 1885 he further favoured the creation of "profitable posts" for German princes in the Balkans, similar to those already existing in Roumania and Bulgaria. " Even a King of Armenia," he argued, " would, in following an Armenian policy, be just as surely following a German policy as Alexander of Bulgaria and Charles of Roumania." Lagarde and Treitschke were the forerunners. But during the reign of William II there has been a flood of Pan-Germanic literature, much of it fantastic and negligible, but some of it strangely prophetic in the light of recent events. A few of its most characteristic products deserve special attention. In 1895 an anonymous Pan-German writer pub- lished, under the title of "Great Germany and Central Europe in the Year 1950," a book which enjoyed con- siderable vogue by reason of its audacious and detailed programme. According to it, Germany was to be trans- formed into the " Great-German League " by absorb- ing the Austrian Empire, Holland, and Belgium, the Walloon districts of which would fall as a sop to ' " Deutsche Schriften " (1886), p. loi. = Ibid., p. 506. 142 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR the French Cerberus. Thus Rotterdam and Antwerp on the north, Trieste on the south, would become German ports, the possession of the latter being, in the opinion of this writer, as in that of Lagarde, a matter of life and death. But this league is to be but the foremost member of a " Great German Customs Union," of which the other five members are to be a Baltic Principality ; the Kingdom of Poland ; Greater Roumania, conceived as a buffer state between Russia and the Balkan Slavs ; a Kingdom of the Ukraine, including Odessa ; and Greater Serbia. The German Navy would thus be supreme on the Adriatic and the Black Sea. To-day who would dare to dismiss this programme as a mere Utopia ? An abler and extremely popular exposition of a similar theme is the pamphlet of Karl von Winter- stetten — " Berlin-Bagdad : New Aims of Mid- European Policy" — whose programme is summed up as follows : " New peasant land, a great economic area, the salvation of Germanism in the Danubian Monarchy, the union of all Germans, a free path to the South-east, protection of the non-Slav races of the South-east against Pan-Slavism — in short, Berlin- Bagdad. . . . On the execution of this task depends the future of our race. If we fail, there is no more habitable land in the world for the Teuton to hold as master, and it will be our fate to be cultural manure." Similar ideas underlie the writings of Count Reventlow, whose very able books on " Ger- many's Foreign Policy " and " The Vampire of the Continent " (a polite attention addressed to England) have had infinitely greater influence on German opinion than Bernhardi's pseudo-philosophy, but have not received the same free advertisement in England. In the mind of the modern Pan-German abuse and depreciation of his neighbours lead naturally "CENTRAL EUROPE" 143 to extravagant self-glorification. In the words of Fritz Bley, one of the most active pamphleteers of the Pan-German League, the Germans " are the most efficient people in all fields of knowledge and art. We are the best colonists, the best seamen, the best merchants. And yet we do not attain to our share in the world's heritage because we will not learn the lesson of history. Have we not had enough of the disgrace and humiliation, of the dis- honour of the German soul by France, Rome, England, the Slavs and the Huns ? Will people in Germany not understand at last that all the mis- fortunes of our history for the last thousand years have flown from the baneful tendencies of the Germans to cosmopolitan fancies ? " ^ This modest attitude reached its supreme expression in the writings of the renegade Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who has demonstrated to his own satisfaction and to that of his adopted countrymen, that every good thing in the modern world is the product of Teutonic genius, and with the sublime courage of a pedant carries his theories to the logical conclusion that even Our Lord Himself was of the only stock which is capable of good results. Perhaps the most scientific expression of Pan-German doctrine is to be found in a book published in 1905 by Georg Reimer, " Ein pangermanisches Deutschland." His whole argument rests upon a denial of the right of small nations to their existence and language. Writing of Austria-Hungary, he says: "This chaos of peoples stands between three States which have a right to a future of their own — Germany, Italy, Russia. So long as events do not march, we may rest content with the phrase that its existence is a political neces- sity ; but when it comes to the decision, then he ' Bley, op. cit., p. 21. 144 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR who has the right to live will take this right from him whose life is one long illness. The higher morality of this world, one of the new values (Werte), says that two strong men shall rather do wrong to a third weak man than that they should prejudice their own fruitful development in favour of the other unhealthy individual." ' Germany alone can aim at hegemony. A French world-empire being impossible, a German world-empire must arise. The smaller nations must go to the wall, both because they have German blood-admixture, and because they form a geographical and political obstacle {rdiunlich iind politisch) in the way of German development. Germany's a-.m, then, must be (a) a Teutonic empire of German race, and a world-empire of Teutonic races under the hegemony of the German people ; ^ (6) the gradual Germaniza- tion of all the races of Scandinavia and the Nether- lands ; and (c) the disruption of the non-German races, to be followed either by their Germanization or their expulsion. Hence on the one hand Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, and Poles are to be rooted out ; on the other hand France must be reduced to sub- jection, though the author graciously "grants to France its natural autonomy in so far as it can be brought into harmony with our dream of a German world-empire." In a word, Reimer's programme is ruthless Germanization, alike for the greater glory of the race, for the acquisition of land for its material development and of free space for its surplus popula- tion. " Mehr Land, mehr Rasse," 3 is the cry ; but ' Reiraer, op. cit., p. 115. = " Ein germanisches Stammesreich deutscher Nation, ein Weltreich germanischer Stamme unter der Hegemonic des deutschen Volkes," p. 137. 3 Ibid., p. 137. "CENTRAL EUROPE" 145 this apotheosis of material greed, as appHed to the non-German races of Central Europe, would inevit- ably make of its victims " Stimmvieh " in peace-time and " Kanonenf utter " in war-time. Reimer is merely working out in the pedant's study what the statesmen of Hungary and the landowners of Posen have put into practice for the last two generations. Stated in the terms of German materialism, the world- market cannot put up with a second purely in- dustrialized State such as England. Germany, then, must combine industry and agriculture, and to that end must expand and take in fresh agricultural land. Thus " Mehr Land" is even more an economic than a national catchword. Since the war another book, entitled "The New Triple Alliance " (" Der neue Dreibund "), by Ernst Koehler, has been much discussed in Germany. The role assigned by him to Germany is that of " liberator of the Western Slavs." Russia is to be driven east- wards, Finland is to be restored to Sweden, Poland and the Ukraine liberated. This is an interesting " liberal " variation of the orthodox Pan-German view, that Galicia may well be thrown to Russia as ballast from the Austrian balloon, while the German and Slovene provinces of Austria would be included in the German Empire as a new kingdom, the Eastern Adriatic coast would become a " Reichsland " on the analogy of Alsace-Lorraine, and the Austro- Hungarian Navy would be incorporated in the German. The extreme doctrine of absorption in Germany, preached so unashamedly by the Pan- German deputies in the Austrian Parliament for years past, has to-day received a more decorous form. Instead of cheers for the Hohcnzollern dynasty and an open invitation to civil war and a Prussian invasion of Bohemia, \vc are presented with the 10 iga oMlna G Cogeiiha^en ""^^ ^DA;Nzi?o^ •••• -sA ^ .••■ /— ^ V- Berlin '•. co > o Munich^ L:^„£i"") "^ I.. Nisho )-d/^ Duhazzo^fc ' "B: roussa fj'.^^i "^^ TURKEY G.'O'. The New Europe on a basis of NATIONALITY. Existing fronciers^^-^ New frontiers Free Pores. underlined TtierMappa Oropaw "CENTRAL EUROPE" 147 theory that "Austria must exist for Germany," and that " it will be Germany's task after the war to transform the old Austria into a new German Austria." Amid all this literature one book stands out pre- eminent — " Mitteleuropa," by the Radical politician and economist Friedrich Naumann, one of Germany's sanest and most serious political thinkers. Without a trace of rant or sabre-rattling, on the basis of wide knowledge, both historical, political, and economic, and in eloquent yet sober language, he builds up an elaborate argument for the fusion and consolidation of the two Central States after the war, as a single unit with a solid front to the outer world. The Northern Powers, Holland, Switzerland, and the Balkan Peninsula, are not to be included at the very outset ; they still have a little time before them in which to make their choice. The essence of his plan is to create the kernel ; all the rest will follow auto- matically. All historical particularism must be wiped out by the stress of world-war, in so far as it may interfere with the idea of unity. This war, he argues, is not merely a German war, as so many leading Germans claim, but the crucible in which "Mittel- europa" is to be shaped. Nor must Naumann be regarded as a mere Jingo ; for almost at the outset he protests against Bethmann-Hollweg's theory of the decisive struggle between Teuton and Slav and condemns it as an insult to the Czechs, Poles, and Slovenes, all of whom must be brought to realize their identity of interest and common future with the Germans and Magyars. " Mitteleuropa " must be the fruit of joint economic labour, but also of joint intellectual effort, and must lead to emancipation from the spell of French and Russian influence. It means an end to the old jealousy of Prussia and 148 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR Austria, of Berlin and Vienna. "An united nation of brothers " {ein einig Volk von Bri'idern) must revive the old conception of the mediaeval Empire, organized on the intensest possible modern methods. Questions of language and religion may be treated as side issues, so long as there is unity in essentials. The root fact upon which Naumann rests his whole argument is the argument that Germany must either abandon the idea of being a world Power, or organize Central Europe under her aegis as an economic unit. The days of small States being numbered, and our century being marked by the development of vast world-States, " Mittel- europa " is essential, if there is to be something German to place beside the British and Russian Empires, the French colonial empire, China and Japan, the United States, and Spanish America, the six great organisms which the nineteenth century has formed, or which are still taking shape before our eyes. Throughout the book Naumann's tone remains eminently sane, and if all Germans shared his out- look and his moderation it is probable that there would long ago have been such a development on entirely peaceful lines. But developed further accord- ing to the tenets of Treitschke and Lagarde, of Prince Biilow and Bassermann, of Rohrbach and Schiemann, it would swiftly become a terrible danger to the rest of Europe, which is scarcely able as a coalition to resist Germany's impetus, and might be reduced to helplessness if all the resources of Mitteleuropa, including her Polish and Balkan conquests, could be organized by the relentless system of Potsdam. Mitteleuropa is the first stage. The second — that of " Berlin-Bagdad " — is also far from new. Quite apart from Moltke's dream of a German Palestine, we find Roscher, in 1848, arguing that Turkey's heritage should fall to Germany. In 1846 List pro- "CENTRAL EUROPE" 149 posed the Bagdad Railway and German colonization of Asia Minor ; and similar ideas can be traced in Rodbertus, Lassalle and others. Though Bismarck affected indifference for the Eastern Question, it was his role as honest broker at the Congress of Berlin which first opened the door to German influence at Constantinople. In 1882 the first German military mission was sent to reorganize the Ottoman army ; and though Von der Goltz never obtained enough power to make his reforms effective, the German military tradition was firmly established in Turkey, and with it the connection of Krupp as the furnisher of war material. In 1886 the Orientalist Sprenger published a book on " Babylonia : the Richest Land of the Past and the most Remunerative Field of Colonization in the Present," and declared it to be the sole country not yet occupied by a Great Power. Kaerger, too, advocated Abia Minor as a field of colonization. Their writings coincide with the period when German engineers and emissaries of the Deutsche Bank were founding the Anatolian Railway Society and building as far as Angora and Konia. The Pan-Germans, of course, pushed the idea of a protectorate of Asia Minor and the acquisition of Mesopotamia and Syria. Among numerous students of the ground was an artillery officer, Kannenberg, who in 1897 published a monograph on " Asia Minor's Natural Riches," and who, significantly enough, was accompanied by an officer of the Ger- man General Staff. A year later it was William II himself who, as the " Imperial commercial traveller," propagated the German idea in the Middle East. At Damascus he proclaimed himself the " friend for ever" of the whole Mohammedan world. At Jeru- salem he chose the anniversary of the nailing of Luther's theses on the church door of Wittenberg 150 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR to reiterate Luther's famous resolve " to maintain this field " (Das Feld muss er behalten). In Constan- tinople he extracted from the blood-stained hand of Abdul Hamid, still reeking from the Armenian massacres, valuable commercial concessions for the Germans in Asia Minor. In 1899 the Porte con- cluded with Dr. Siemens, 'of the Deutsche Bank and the Anatolian Railway Company, a comprehensive contract, conceding to Germany in principle the whole railway system as far as the Persian Gulf. In 1902 the actual right of construction as far as Bagdad was also conceded. It is impossible in the present volume to treat in detail the complicated negotiations and intrigues which followed this event, and led to more than one important modification of the original contract. But it is essential to emphasize the need for careful study of this policy of " peaceful penetration" by which Germany prepared the way for what her leaders glory in describing as "the German War." The tireless work of the Deutsche Bank, and the brilliant writings of Von der Goltz Pasha, Paul Rohrbach (" The German Idea in the World"), Hugo Grothe, and many others, have done much to popularize the idea that Mesopotamia and Asia Minor are destined to become " an economic substitute for the lack of a German Canada or Australia," and it is essential that we should be well informed as to the views of the enemy, both before and during the war, on this subject. It is all the more essential, because the secret negotiations between the British and German Governments re- garding the Bagdad railway, in the eighteen months which preceded the outbreak of war, appear to have been based upon a complete failure on the part of our leaders to comprehend the very elements of the situation in the Near East. CHAPTER VII BOHEMIA AS A RAMPART AGAINST PAN-GERMANISM In any study of the struggle between Teuton and Slav in Central Europe, special attention must be devoted to Bohemia, which has for eight centuries formed a bulwark against Germanization. Indeed, no Slavonic race has shown such tenacity and virility in the face of a powerful enemy and in a highly exposed geographical situation. General Fadejev, the Russian Panslavist writer, once wrote, " Without Bohemia the Slav cause is for ever lost ; it is the head, the advance- guard of all Slavs " ; it would seem as though every Czech is conscious of this fact and of the national mission which it implies. The struggle of the Czech against the German noble, the German townsman, and the German priesthood runs like a red thread through all Bohemian history. In early centuries the national dynasty of the Pfemysls was involved in continual strife with the German ; and its greatest king, Ottokar, had extended his rule over Austria and Styria as well, until in 1278 he was overthrown by Rudolf of Habsburg, the founder of the Imperial House of Austria. The banks of the river March have twice been fatal to the Slavs — in the ninth century, when the Magyars destroyed the rising Moravian State, and three centuries later, when 15J 152 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR Ottokar's death prepared the way for the rise of modern Austria. It is, however, interesting to note that though this latter event brought disaster and anarchy upon Bohemia and arrested her expansion for a time, and though it eventually worked out to the advantage of the German as against the Czech race, it was none the less not so regarded at the time. Indeed, Ottokar had made himself extremely un- popular by showing what was regarded as undue favour to the German townsmen. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are the golden age of Bohemian history. From 13 lo to 1437 the country was governed by kings of the House of Luxemburg — German by race, but none the less French by temperament and habits. Under them may be noticed the beginning of that intimacy between Bohemia and France which has revived at intervals ever since, and which is more marked than ever to-day, when so many Czechs are fighting heroically in the ranks of the French army. King John of Bohemia appears for a brief moment upon the pages of English history as the blind knight-errant who fell at Crecy and bequeathed the device of the three ostrich plumes to the Prince of Wales. It was under his far abler son, King Charles, better known as the Emperor Charles IV, that Bohemia acquired a position of European importance. It was Charles who in 1348 founded in his capital, Prague — Golden Prague as it soon came to be called — the first univer- sity, not only of the Slavonic but also of the German world. Prague rapidly acquired a fame almost equal to that of the three great mediaeval universities of Bologna, Paris, and Oxford ; and soon became the centre of the first great spiritual conflict between the Slav and German mi p. Is. The victory of the Czechs BOHEMIA A8 A RAMPART 153 in this acute and prolonged struggle was due above all to the genius of one man. John Hus is essentially the national hero of Bohemia, revered by the vast majority of the nation, even by those who are devout Catholics and do not accept his religious views. For while those of us who are Protestants admire him as one of the foremost heroes in the Reformation, and almost the first to make a breach in the mediaeval theocracy which so long paralysed thought and progress in Europe, Hus has a further meaning to his own countrymen as the champion of Czech nationality, and as the inaugurator of a national tradition which has never wholly died and has flamed into new life in the last few decades. He is more- over the true founder of Czech literature, both by his translation of the Bible and as the author of philo- logical treatises and the reformer of Slav orthography ; and in all these respects, as also in his enthusiasm for church music, it is possible to draw an interesting parallel between Hus and Luther, who owed so much to the Slav reformer's teachings. Hus may even be claimed as an early advocate of Slav unity ; and in 1410 he wrote to congratulate the King of Poland upon his great victory over the Teutonic Knights at Tannenbcg — that victory which the Germans claim to have venged in the summer of 1914. Most assuredly Lord Bryce was not exaggerating when at the meeting held in London in honour of the Hus quincentenary he declared that no nation in Europe has selected as its national hero a man of such stainless and ideal character. Scarcely less remarkable was the title of " The People of the Chalice," which their long conflict earned for the Czechs. ^ The spirit of Hus is still alive to-day ; and the stubborn and unbending ' It was for the Communion for both kinds that they contended. 154 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR spirit by which the Hussites of the fifteenth century won their religious Hberty is the same which has steeled them in their uphill fight in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The blind Czech general Zizka, a sort of mediaeval Cromwell, left his mark upon strategy and the art of war ; and the achievement of Bohemia under his leadership, in holding the whole forces of Germany at bay for twenty years, is one of the most remarkable in history. The annals of Bohemia under the Hussites and their great national king George Podiebrad, deserve to be far more widely known. They may be studied in English in the admirable historical works of Count Liitzow, whose recent death is a severe loss to all lovers of Bohemia. Perhaps there is no more remarkable contrast in the history of Bohemia than that between the moderate use to which the Hussites put their victory, and the hateful intolerance and reaction by which Ferdinand of Habsburg and his Jesuit advisers stamped out the Hussite movement two centuries later during the horrors of the Thirty Years' War. Just as by that time Bohemia and Hus had become permanently identified, so the House of Habsburg has nowhere identified itself so closely with Catholicism in its most Ultramontane form as in Bohemia. Heresy was extirpated. The ancient Bohemian nobility was to a large extent rooted out, and two-thirds of the lands belonging to over 650 nobles were confiscated. Czech national literature was systematically destroyed, especi- ally by the Society of Jesus, one of whose most active members boasted that he had himself burnt no fewer than 60,000 Czech volumes.^ In the words of Tomek, the Catholic historian of Prague, " The Jesuits buried the spirit of the Bohemian nation for ' It is hardly necessary to point out the significance of such a figure in the early seventeenth century. BOHEMIA AS A RAMPART 155 two centuries." The battle of the White Mountain (1620), which delivered Bohemia into the merciless hands of Ferdinand, was as disastrous for the Czechs as the battle of Kosovo for the Serbs. The Thirty Years' War was no less ruinous for Bohemia than for Germany ; and as the result of depopulation, plunder, poverty, and wholesale emigration, the population sank from 3,000,000 to 800,000. As her last con- tribution to the world on the eve of destruction, Bohemia left the little sect of the Bohemian and Moravian brethren, whose influence upon the religious life of England and America is well known, and who in recent years have been claimed as the forerunners of Leo Tolstoy ; and the writings of Komensky, who under the Latinized name of Comenius is recognized as one of the founders of modern pedagogy. In 1648 till the early nineteenth century there was utter stagnation in Bohemia, and national life seemed even more extinct among the Czechs than in other provinces of the Habsburg dominion. Latin and German had already completely superseded Czech even before Maria Theresa and Joseph II attempted systematic Germanization. The Jesuits by their hold upon education had done more than any one else to denationalize Bohemia ; and it is probably not a mere coincidence that the first turn of the tide towards the Czech renaissance coincides with the suppression of their Order. At the close of the eighteenth century the first faint signs of reviving national feeling might be detected, and in 1790 a small group of nobles in the Diet actually suggested the use of the Czech language in the schools. But the national revival in Bohemia is essentially the work of scholars. Nothing is more remarkable in the history of the various national movements in Central and South-eastern Eu: ^pv- than the pari 156 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR played by historians and philologists in reviving the memory of the past and inspiring a programme for the future. Early last century a tiny group of Czech patriots was in the habit of meeting in the private room of a Prague inn, and one of them was scarcely exaggerating when he jestingly remarked, '* If the ceiling of this room were to fall, there would be an end of the national movement in Bohemia." Dobrovsky was the first and greatest of these scholars. An ardent disciple of the French encyclopaedists, and one of the founders of Slav philology, he did more than any other man to shake off the dust of centuries, to restore Czech to its true position as a living language instead of a peasant patois, to insist upon close contact with the peasantry, and to revive the study of Old Slavonic. Not less epoch-making were the dictionary and grammar of Jungmann, which made the modern literary renaissance possible, the researches of Safafik in Slav anti-quities which revolutionized all prevailing ideas on early Slav life and history in Russia as well as in Bohemia, and the historical writings of Palacky, which have long taken their place among the great historical classics of the nineteenth century. It is also important to note that the Pan-Slav movement, in its most ideal form, as an expression of the kinship and brotherhood of all the different Slavonic races, originated quite as much in Bohemia as in Russia. Its earliest mouthpiece, Jan Kollar, who was clergyman of the Slovak Lutheran church in Budapest, wrote two epoch-making books — a long epic poem entitled "The Daughter of Slava," in which he sang the glories of Slavdom and created in imitation of Dante a mythical Slav Olympus and Hades, where the friends and enemies of the Slav race are picturesquely grouped, and a short essay advocating "the literary reciprocity of all Slavs." These books, like the parallel work of BOHEMIA AS A RAMPART 157 Safafik, awakened a resounding echo throughout the Slav world. During the first half of the nineteenth century, then, the ground was prepared by thinkers and writers. The Bohemian museum was founded in 1818, and in the years that followed the Matica Ceska, a society for the publication of modern literature, became the pioneer of numerous clubs and societies, while the literary revival was strengthened by the appearance of several poets of a high order — Kollar, Celakovsky, Erben, and others. But politically everything remained as dead as before. Even with a knowledge of the reign of terror which the Great War has imposed upon Bohemia it is very difficult to realize the degree to which the censorship of the Metternich era stifled every move- ment and discouraged every idea. In 1805 the Statt- halter addressed the nobles of the Bohemian Diet with the words, " Your sole and supreme mission consists in forestalling even the most fugitive wishes of the sovereign " ; and it was on this principle, if principle it can be called, that the authorities acted right up to the year 1848. The rigour of the censorship is well illustrated by a sentence from the correspondence of Jungmann, who wrote in 1827 to a friend : "With the word Slav I acted with infinite precaution towards the censorship, and the same applies to all sensible writers. Thus Palacky has laid down a fundamental rule not to mention in his journal either Slavia or the Slavs." A certain book was not allowed to be published because in it the mother of St. Wenceslas, the hero of our own English carol and almost a contemporary of Alfred, "is not represented in accordance with the popular beliefs which have been accepted for centuries." Palacky, in writing his great history of Bohemia, found that not merely single statements or comments but the whole spirit of his book was frankly challenged. The 158 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR censor adhered rigidly to the view that Bohemia being Cathohc, it was inadmissible to praise the heretic John Hus and his followers, and that as there were Germans as well as Czechs in Bohemia, it was inadmissible to sow national hatred by reviving the memory of past struggles in such a way as to hinder what was frankly described as "the dominant nationality." The effect of these years of preparation at once became apparent in the year of revolution (1848). At first Prague played almost as great a part as Vienna, though the movement in the former town was sup- pressed more quickly ; and it was at Kremsier, in the lands of the Bohemian crown, that the central parlia- ment met. The example of the German Federal Diet of Frankfurt was immediately taken up in Prague, and a Slav congress was held there under the historian Palacky. This congress rested upon a somewhat illogical basis ; for on the one hand delegates from all Slav countries were welcomed — Poles, Russians, and Serbs as well as Croats, Slovenes, and Slovaks — and on the other hand its organizers openly established the principle that Austria must be strengthened, not de- stroyed. " If there were no Austria," said Palacky, " it would be necessary to create one." He offended the Germans by refusing to send delegates to Frank- furt, but he continued to advocate a definite system of Austrian Federalism, and worked for this programme until the very end of his political career. Palacky's phrase has been adopted as a convenient catchword which dispensed us from thinking further about the true inwardness of the Austrian situation. Its real meaning, which has been so profoundly mis- understood, was that the dissolution of Austria would involve a European upheaval, and therefore that those who wished to avert a world-war must work for the maintenance of Austria. To-day this world-war is BOHEMIA AS A RAMPART 159 with us, and in it one of the most vital of all the problems which await decision is the question whether Austria-Hungary is to survive as the tool of Germany, or to be dissolved once more into its component parts — in other words, whether we are to revert to the situation which prevailed before the existing menace forced these various provinces into unwilling partner- ship. To-day the old words and phrases have lost their values, and may be thrown ruthlessly overboard. If we are to quote from Palacky, we should surely do better to cite the words which he applied to his native Bohemia ; " Before Austria was, we were, and when Austria no longer is, we still shall be." And in these days of aerial assassins it is worth quoting another phrase of the great Bohemian historian : " Our nation must not forget that it is fighting for justice, that it has no right to imitate the violent procedure of its adver- saries, and that its triumph must be that of civiliza- tion." Such a phrase is altogether worthy of the chronicler of the Hussite movement, of the man who transfused the old Hussite battle spirit into the modern political and intellectual life of his country. The year 1848 ended in black reaction and in disillusionment for all the races of Austria-Hungary. But so far as Bohemia was concerned, the national current was now irresistible, and has deepened and broadened with every succeeding year. The Czechs have always been weak on the political side, and too apt to indulge in internal political dissensions. But though they failed to produce any great statesmen such as might have held in check Deak and Andrassy, the great Magyar leaders of 1867, they have made tremendous strides in every other direction. Czech literature has produced a number of poets and his- torians, two of whom, Svatopluk Cech and Vrhlicky, belonged to the very front rank, as well as numerous 160 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR novelists, dramatists, and critics. In drama the Czechs are also well to the fore. The Bohemian National Theatre at Prague is one of the best of its kind in Europe ; indeed, to many chance visitors the exist- ence of this splendid Slavonic theatre must have been something of a revelation. Czech music has won the recognition of Europe. Not only are the Czechs, and their half-brothers the Slovaks, extraordinarily rich in folk-songs and melodies, many of which show obvious traces of the ancient Slav Church modes ; they have also produced several composers of the very front rank, notably Dvorak, who is famous throughout Europe, and Smetana, who is less known but equally great, and is indeed regarded as the most characteristic of all Czech composers. Novak, Fibich, and other young composers have also won the attention of the musical v;orld, and the violinist Kubelik is merely the most famous of a series of distinguished pupils of the Prague conservatoire. Though it is impossible to point to any Czech artist of altogether European repu- tation, all visitors to the modern gallery of Prague and to the annual exhibitions of the various art societies are aware that Art is on a higher level in Prague than in many cities more famous in the artistic world. The names of Manes, Cermak, and Brozik, of the sculptors Myslbek, Sucharda, and Francis Uprka deserve to be better known in the West ; and at least a word of praise must be reserved for the brilliant group of Moravian artists which has rallied round the great Slovak peasant-artist Joseph Uprka and has made of their art pavilion at Hodonin (Coding) a shrine of popular art and an inspiration for the artistic development of the future. " Uprka red" has to be seen to be believed, and nowhere can it be seen to better advantage than in the prosperous Slovak villages of the Moravian border. Nor must the educational system of Bohe- BOHEMIA AS A RAMPART 161 mia be passed over in silence. The Czechs have extracted much of what is best in German educational methods and added their own national spirit ; and to- day there are as few illiterates among the Czechs as in Germany itself. The Czech University of Prague, which they won in 1881 in the teeth of envy and determined opposition, stands high in the Slav world, and has been for years past a focus of intellectual life, not merely for Bohemia and Moravia, but also for the Slavs all over Europe, Russia included. The influence exercised by men like Professor Masaryk at Prague upon the whole younger generation of Slavs can hardly be exaggerated. Apart from the University, the school has for two generations been the battle-ground of Czech and German. The Deutsche Schulverein and the Matica Skolska have fought over every town, village, and hamlet ; and the progress registered by the Czechs, in spite of the strongest hostility of the Ger- mans, and of the support which they received from associations in the German Empire, has been really astonishing. To the German watchword " Lieber ddiitsch sterben als tschechisch verderben" (Better die as Germans than decay as Czechs), the Czechs replied by a virtual boycott of the German language and by an absolute refusal to submit to its continuance as the lingua franca of Bohemia, and by a stubborn insistence upon the absolute rights of the Czech lan- guage — an attitude which no doubt had its awkward side for strangers who tried to speak German on the tramcars of Prague, but which also has its explanation for those who choose to look below the surface. Before the war one of the chief grievances of the Czechs was the refusal of the Germans to tolerate the erection of a second Czech university in Brno (Brunn), the capital of Moravia, to relieve the acute overcrowding in Prague. The number of Czechs in Vienna itself is 11 162 GERMAN, SLAY, AND MAGYAR estimated at almost 400,000, and the so-called Ko- mensky schools which Czech patriotic enterprise had erected there had been closed down during the spring of 1914 by order of the municipality of the Austrian capital. It is as though the opening of Welsh schools had been declared illegal in London. Every German move was countered by a Czech move, down to the minutest detail of daily life. A notable example just outside the ordinary framework of school life is supplied by the famous Sokol gymnastic societies, which, organized two generations ago by Czech patriots on the model of the German Turnvereine, but adapted to Czech requirements, have played a vital part in kindling and extending the national patriotism of Bohemia. Thus we have the strange phenomenon of two races side by side in the same country, living their own national life and possessing their own ideals and traditions, yet never mixing with each other — two races not belonging to different stages of civilization like the Magyar noble and his victim the Roumanian peasant, or like the Poles and Ruthenes of Galicia, but equal in culture, in energy, in determination, the one with all the backing of the most highly organized Empire of modern times, the other discouraged and frowned upon by the highest in the State, isolated and dependent upon its own resources, but absolutely indomitable and acting upon the phrase of its leader Rieger, " We won't give in." There is yet another field where the Czechs play a prominent part. Bohemia and Silesia are the chief industrial centres of Austria. Bohemian glass, sugar, and textiles have won something more than local fame, and Pilsen is almost equally famous for its beer and for the armaments of the great Skoda works. It is the rapid growth of Bohemian mining industries BOHEMIA AS A RAMPART 163 and manufactures which has so seriously compHcated the racial struggle between Czech and German. So long as the population remained more or less rooted to the soil, there was at least the possibility of mapping out the mixed districts and settling upon their special treatment. But with a population kept in a state of continual ebb and flow by industrial developments, minorities are continually cropping up in unexpected places, and then again disappearing ; and it is un- fortunately the case that both Czech and German employers put very considerable pressure on their workmen in a national sense. In short, economics and nationality are inextricably interwoven in Bohemia, just as in Hungary, Roumania, and the Balkans. What makes the racial struggle so fierce is the fact that it is a middle-class struggle. It is the middle classes, and especially the lower middle class, which have been the torch-bearers of Czech nationality and have introduced a democratic flavour by restoring the lost contact with the peasantry, while the aristocracy has been left far behind in the ideas of the eighteenth century, to rally or not as it pleased to the national cause. The struggle has swayed to and fro over almost every yard of ground in the country, and it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that every Czech inscription over a tailor's shop or on a mailbag, repre- sents a contest between Czech and German. Every village and literally almost every house has been fought over in the mixed districts. Every child is counted by die rival propagandists, and the murderous competition of rival bands in Macedonia is out- distanced in its intensity by this peaceful and civilized propaganda. One hardly knows whether to lament the tremendous waste of energy which these conllicts involve or to marvel at the latent force which their existence reveals. IQi GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR In the internal politics of Austria-Hungary the Czechs of all parties have always vigorously protested against the Dual system, insisting on the claims of the historical Crown and Kingdom of St. Wenceslas, as entitled to at least as much consideration as the Hungarian Crown of St. Stephen. They feel their position all the more keenly, because Francis Joseph has on two separate occasions promised to be crowned as King of Bohemia — first in i86t to a Czech deputa- tion, and secondly, in 1871, in an Imperial decree recognizing the State Rights of the Bohemian Crown. His failure to fulfil his plighted word is, of course, above all due to the opposition of the Magyars, who opposed the Federalist solution in 1871, and brought about the dismissal of the Hohenwart Ministry. On that occasion the official organ of Count Andrassy and the Hungarian Government openly declared : " Hungary will have nothing to do with Slav Austria. We Hungarians shall do all in our power to frustrate the reconstruction. Call it selfishness if you like ; but that will be our policy." To-day the Magyars are pur- suing exactly the same policy. Early in the present year they invited representatives of the Austrian Parliament to confer in Budapest ; but it is instructive to note that only German deputies received an invitation. Not a single Czech or Southern Slav or Pole was present. The linguistic and national feud between Czech and German has been the foremost fact of internal Austrian history since 1867. Its crowning incident was the notorious scene in which the Pan-Germans, in their fury at Czech claims, cheered the House of Hohen- zollern on the floor of the Austrian Parliament (1903). The Czechs have for two generations past been the soul of the opposition to Germanism, and after the war they will still remain, unless they are weakly BOHEMIA AS A RAMPART 165 abandoned by those in whom they trust, a strong national citadel against the Germans. Their fervent nationalism in home politics is reflected in their outlook upon foreign policy. The Czechs have always opposed by every means in their power the influence of Berlin upon Vienna, and the conclusion and maintenance of the Triple Alliance. Public opinion in Bohemia has always been consistently Francophil and Anglophil, and above all Russophil, emphasizing the kinship and blood ties of all the Slav races. In 1870 it sympathized keenly with France, in 1878 with Russia and her noble struggle for the liberation of the Balkans, for opposing which Britain is to-day paying so terribly in blood and treasure. In 1908 it sympathized equally with Serbia during the Bosnian crisis ; for it should be noted that Prague has long been a very important centre of Southern Slav culture, to which hundreds of Serb, Croat, and Bulgar students flock every year. In 191 2 there was no country where the victories of the Balkan League aroused greater delight than in Prague ; and to-day it is scarcely an exaggeration to assert that every man, woman, and child in Bohemia sympathizes with Russia, and longs for the victory of Russia and her Western allies, as Bohemia's only hope of salvation. Since the outbreak of war the situation in Bohemia has crown more and more intolerable, until at last it falls little short of a reign of terror. Espionage and censor- ship are so complete, that it is dangerous to make any public comment upon current affairs. Political life has from the first been entirely suspended. As neither the Austrian Parliament nor the provincial Diets have been allowed to meet, there is no parliamentary immunity. In the first months of the war great efforts were made to induce the Czech parties to publish a 166 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR manifesto in favour of Austria, but entirely without success. All remained ominously silent. In April 1915 one of the Clerical leaders was persuaded to take the initiative in reviving the proposal, but he found himself entirely isolated and had to abandon the attempt. On April 28th the Agrarian organ Venkov commented on this incident in language which a little later would certainly have led to its suppression. " There is no doubt that after the war the small nations will play a very considerable part, and above all the Czech people, whose civilization is highly developed and forms a bridge between West and East, will be revealed and duly appreciated. . . . Hitherto our people have kept silent, without fear and with a profound conviction in a better future: but after the war we shall reclaim all that belongs to us by right and all that we have demanded for years past in this Monarchy." During the first six months the only prominent Czech politician to be arrested was Mr. KlofacJ, the National Socialist deputy, who was implicated on the strength of compromising letters written to him from Switzerland — it is asserted by Austrian agents-provo' catenrs. Wild rumours were circulated in the Russian Press, that^^r. Kramaf, the Young Czech leader, and Professor Masaryk, the leader of the Realists,^ the two foremost men in Bohemian political life, had been summarily executed ; but this story was as ill- founded as similar legends in other countries. In December 1914, however, Professor Masaryk, unable any longer to endure the intolerable conditions in Bohemia, succeeded in leaving Austria, and after an interval of seclusion came forward as the champion of the Bohemian cause abroad. In October he was appointed lecturer in Slav literature and sociology at ' See p. 99. BOHEMIA AS A RAMPART 167 the University of London (in connection with the new School of Slavonic Studies), and the Prime Minister consented to take the chair at his inaugural lecture on the problem of Small Nations in Europe. On November 14, 1915, he and Mr. Diirich, a deputy of the Czech Agrarian party in the Austrian Parliament and the only other politician who had succeeded in escaping from Bohemia, issued a manifesto which denounced Austria's complete subordination to Berlin and demanded the independence of Bohemia and the Slovak districts. Meanwhile, on May 23rd, the Young Czech leader, Dr. Kramaf, and another deputy. Dr. Scheiner, the president of the famous Bohemian Sokols, had been placed under arrest, at the express orders of the military authorities and of the Archduke Frederick himself, who in a private report to Vienna charged the entire Czech nation with Russophil sentiments. The property of Dr. Kramaf was confiscated, and after remaining over six months in prison he was brought to trial before a Viennese court on a charge of high treason. The indictment extended to three hundred pages, and was to a large extent based upon the prominent part which Dr. Kramaf had played at the Slav Congress of 1908 and upon his voluminous correspondence with Russian and French writers and politicians. After interminable delays the trial was. at last adjourned, and rumour assigned as a reason th'e prisoner's threat of disclosures relating to Count Berchtold's policy during the Balkan wars. The true explanation is much more serious. It appears that during the first winter of the war Dr. Kramaf undertook a secret mission to Pctro£:irad with the full knowledge and approval of Count Berchtold himself, but that after the latter's fall the military authorities insisted upon treating his action" as 168 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR treasonable and ignoring the part played in it by the Ballplatz. Moreover, the court employed as an in- criminating document against Dr. Kramaf a copy of a letter which he had addressed shortly before the war to the Governor of Bohemia, Prince Thun, on Austria's policy towards the Slavs. Prince Thun himself came forward as a witness at the trial, and by producing the original letter revealed the fact that its text had been very materially altered for the use of the court-martial, in order to strengthen the charge of high treason. Thus once again we are faced by the inveterate Austrian official practice of applying to the conduct of political trials forgery as a supplement to espionage.^ The fate of Kramaf and Klofac has exercised, as was intended, an intimidating effect upon the lesser leaders of the nation. Mr. Choc, Dr. Baxa, and two other Agrarian deputies, in whom a last flicker of independent feeling could still be detected, have been compelled to leave Bohemia and take up permanent residence in Vienna (January 1916). With every month the severity of the authorities towards the Czechs was accentuated still further. On November 24, 19 15, a decree of the Minister of the Interior announced the dissolution of the Bohemian Sokols and of the inter-Slavonic Federa- tion of Sokols of which Prague has always been the centre. A deadly blow was thus struck at one of the most characteristic features of Czech national life ; for the 953 Sokol societies of Bohemia counted no less than 110,000 members, and may without exagera- tion be described as the backbone of the nation. Only ten days later all the remaining Slav associations of Prague were dissolved. Germanizing tendencies became more and more marked, and on January 15, 1916, in defiance of all existing laws, German was • See Times, May 3, 1916. BOHEMIA AS A RAMPART 169 proclaimed by the Governor as the official language of political administration throughout Bohemia. The Archbishop of Prague was transferred to the see of Olmiitz and replaced by a German prelate. The reign of terror which has thus briefly been described is the result of a fundamental difference of outlook between the Austrian Government and the Czech nation, which is incurably Germanophobe and Slavophile and clings stubbornly to the traditions of a great historic past. These feelings are firmly rooted throughout the nation, and found practical expression in the reluctance of the Czech troops to fight against Russia or Serbia. The 8th, 28th, 30th, 88th, and 102nd Regiments and the nth Regiment of Landwehr ' surrendered either en masse or in part without firing a shot, to an "enemy" whom they regarded as a "deliverer"; and there have been repeated cases of mutinies, fusillades, and other punishments in other regiments as well. Perhaps the most remarkable incident is that which occurred in Prague itself at the end of September 1914. The 28th Regiment — known as " Children of Prague " — left for the Galician front, escorted on its way by a large and sympathetic crowd, soldiers and civilians singing together their national songs, and above all the famous Panslav hymn " Hej Slovani," which contains a verse in honour of the Russians and the French as friends in the struggle against the Germans. Not content with this, they carried before them a white banner bearing as an inscription an extra verse written for the same hymn, to the effect that " we are march- ing against the Russians, but nobody knows why." So strong was the feeling of both the soldiers and the crowd, that the officers of the regiment did not ven- ture to remove the banner. At an early opportunity ' See La Nation Tcheque, Nos. 2 and 15. 170 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR the regiment passed over, officers and men together, to the Russians. On April 17, 1915, an Imperial decree was issued ordering the dissolution of the regiment and the deposition of its flag in the Museum of Vienna. Punishment has not of course been confined to the army. According to statistics published by the Neiies Wiener Tagblait, 720 civilians had been executed in Bohemia between August 1914 and January 1916, and during the same period 245 in Moravia. By the end of May the total had risen to 1,200. To-day Bohemia lies bound and muzzled at the mercy of the Austrian Government, which has itself become a mere handmaid of Berlin. Her political leaders are in prison, in exile, or reduced to impo- tence ; her institutions are in abeyance, her literature suppressed; her leading newspapers have either ceased to appear or have become mere organs of the police, compelled to publish without comment the articles which are supplied to them by the authorities. But the spirit of Bohemia, though held in bondage, is not broken, and it remains one of the most valuable assets in the struggle against Germany. To-day no one who is opposed to Germany can withhold his sympathy and interest from a nation which holds a record for irreconcilable opposition to Germany such as not even the Poles can boast, and which has suffered at the hands of the Germans scarcely less cruelty than the Poles themselves. Bohemia has shown by her whole past history an idealism, a capacity for sacrifice, and powers of endurance and organization, such as prove her a thousand times over to be worthy and able to live her own life. The nation which was the first in Europe to vindicate the principle of religious liberty has a great part to play in the task which lies before the Allies to-day — the vindication of political liberty for all the nations of Europe. CHAPTER VIII THE PAN-GERMAN PLAN AND ITS ANTIDOTE In an earlier chapter an attempt has been made to provide a brief survey of Pan-German aspirations, as reflected in the writings of the leading German publicists. In the years preceding the war a few voices of warning reached our ears — notably from that gallant pioneer, M. Andre Cheradame in France, from the late Mr. Thomas Arnold (" Vigilans sed yEquus "), and Dr. Charles Sarolea in England ; but it is no exaggeration to assert that the overwhelming body of public opinion shared the scepticism or in- difference of official circles, and either ignored these true prophets altogether or relegated them as mono- maniacs to the same honourable category as the late Lord Roberts or Mr. Maxse. Whether real statesman- ship on the part of our rulers during the years following King Edward's death would have averted the conflict by convincing Germany that the risks of the game were too great, is a question which would lead too far afield. The essential fact is that under William II Germany has been plagued by vast ambitions and growing unrest, which finally took the form of a challenge to all Europe in arms. To-day it is no longer possible or necessary to argue about the exact strength of Pan-Germanism on the eve of war. For in war moderate counsels are necessarily thrust into 171 172 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR the background on every side ; and to-day Germany is writing the Pan-German programme in letters of blood on the face of Europe. Her alliance with Austria-Hungary has become more indissoluble than ever, and the idea of a customs-union as a final seal upon the bond is being propagated by prominent politicians, publicists, professors, and bankers. Three members of the Austrian Cabinet who opposed the idea were driven from office during last winter. Germany reorganized the Austro-Hungarian Army when it had reached breaking-point, and does not mean to relinquish the control which this fact has given her. To all intents and purposes Mitteleuropa is shaping before our very eyes. Turkey and Bulgaria are in the German grip, and the consummate folly of our statesmen in deserting Serbia and bargaining with Bulgaria has thrown away an invaluable strategic position, brought untold misery on a gallant Ally, and opened the gate to Constantinople, which it was alike our duty and interest to block. To-day we^are faced by a solid mid-European bloc of 120 millions, which can only be shattered or pared down by military effort, but cannot be split up by diplomacy ; by the maturing project of a kingdom of Poland under a German or Austrian sovereign, as an annexe, industrial, agricultural, and military, to Germany ; by the prospect of a Balto-Lithuanian state also under German rule ; by the certainty that Serbia will be annexed to the Habsburg Monarchy unless we can deliver her through force of arms ; by the no less certain prospect of Bulgaria under King Ferdinand continuing as a vassal of Austria-Hungary and Germany ; and of Turkey reorganized and exploited by Berlin, becoming a constant menace to Egypt, Persia, and Arabia. THE PAN-GERMAN PLAN 173 This situation cannot be met by a few vague phrases about Prussian militarism, admirable eighteen months ago as a first statement of our case, but to-day worth- less unless translated into more precise and concrete terms. Unless we are prepared to desert our Allies and conclude an ignominious peace with Germany, we must counter the German plan of " jNIitteleuropa" and "Berlin-Bagdad" by placing obstacles in its f path. In one of its main aspects this war is the \ decisive struggle of Slav and German, and upon it '. depends the final settlement of the Balkan and Austrian problems. On the manner of this settlement and on its completeness depends in turn the question whether this war is to be followed by stable peace in Europe or by the creation of an armed camp. Germany can only be defeated if we are prepared to back the Slavs and liberate the Slav democracies of Central Europe. Stated in another form, the main task which confronts the Allies is that of releasing 35 million Slavs and Latins whom Germany is ruthlessly exploiting in a quarrel which is not theirs. It is only by their emancipation that an effectual obstacle to the German Drang nach Osicn can be created, and Germany restricted to those natural limits within which she would cease to be a danger to the peace of Europe. The essential preliminaries then, are the expulsion of the Turks from Europe and the disruption of the Habsburg Monarchy into its component parts. On its ruins new and vigorous national states will arise. The great historic memories of the past will be adapted to modern economic necessities. Poland, Bohemia, and Serbia will be restored to the commonwealth of nations, and in their new form will constitute a chain of firm obstacles on the path of German aggression. Our barrier to the Drang nacli Osten must then be 174 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR sixfold, (i) Poland, freed from its long bondage and reunited as a State of over 20 million inhabitants on terms of close union with Russia, will be able to develop still further her great natural riches, and to reconstruct her social system on the lines of Western democracy. (2) Bohemia, who has been the vanguard of the struggle against Germanization for eight cen- turies, and has proved herself the most modern, the best organized and educated, and the most virile and persistent of all the Slav races, will, as an independent State possessing natural frontiers, strong and self- supporting industries, and keen national consciousness, become one of the greatest assets in the struggle against Pan-Germanism. (3) The small and land- locked Serbia of the past will be transformed into a strong and united Southern Slav State upon the eastern shore of the Adriatic, no longer seething with unrest as the result of Magyar misrule in Croatia and Austrian economic tariffs, but free at last to develop a national life which has resisted five centuries of Turkish oppression. As a second line behind these three Slavonic States we should aim at creating (4) independent Hungary, stripped of its oppressed nationalities and reduced to its true Magyar kernel, but for that very reason emancipated from the corrupt oligarchy which has hitherto controlled its destinies, and thus enabled to develop as a prosperous and progressive peasant State ; and (5) Greater Roumania, consisting of the present kingdom, augmented by the Roumanian districts of Hungary, Bukovina, and Bess- arabia. Behind these, again, would stand Greece and Bulgaria as national States, the latter purged of her evil desire to exercise hegemony over the Peninsula. (6) Finally, Russia would control Constantinople and the Straits, thus restoring the Cross to its true place "Mj- THE PAN- GERMAN PLAN The Three Stages. 1 . Mitteleuropa. (1 - V) 2. The Great-German Customs Union (Yl-XVl) 3. Berlin-Bagdad rXM-XX). Existing frontiers - ^ - - I (\e M jppa Company 176 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR upon the Golden Horn, and at the same time satisfy that longing and need for an access to the open sea which has underlain Russian policy for at least two centuries. As a free port for all comers, Constantinople could only gain by a Russian protectorate, and the special rights of Roumania in the Black Sea and the Straits would receive the fullest recognition. The alarmist will seek to oppose such a programme by the argument that it involves assigning the German provinces of Austria to Germany, and thus aggran- dizing an enemy whom it must be our aim to weaken by every means in our power. Such arguments are, however, entirely specious. In the first place there is no power on earth which could keep the Germans of Austria and of the Empire apart if once they deter- mined to unite ; and it is quite impossible for us to lay down the principle of nationality as the basis of settlement and then to deny it to the most powerful and compact of all the European nations. Moreover, in the event of our victory — and all such speculation is worthless in any other event — Germany will pre- sumably lose the greater part of Alsace-Lorraine and Posen, and thus any accession of Austrian territory would leave her virtually where she was before. But the decisive reason is the fact that the sole alternative to the completion of German national unity is the survival of Austria-Hungary ; and in present circum- stances this can only mean the latter's reduction to complete military, political, and economic vassalage to Germany. The events of the war have amply de- monstrated the Dual Monarchy's dependence upon German discipline and organizing talent; and if for no other reason, this dependence will tend to increase more and more rapidly as a result of economic exhaus- tion and imminent bankruptcy. Possible failure in THE PAN-GERMAN PLAN 177 other directions will only strengthen Germany's hold upon the Monarchy, which, according to the Pan- German plan, is regarded as a fertile field for German colonization. In other words, we are faced by the alternative of breaking up Austria-Hungary, in which case Germany obtains an addition of eight or nine million inhabitants, but is restricted to her natural limits and is surrounded by virile and national States — or of permitting its survival, and thus securing to Germany the final assertion of political control over its fifty-one million inhabitants, and thus indirectly the mastery of Central Europe and the control of the Adriatic, the Balkans, and Constantinople. But even with the establishment of free and vigorous national States upon the ruins of the old order, there must inevitably remain the difficult problem of racial minorities, whose interests are of secondary but none the less of vital importance. And just as every effort must be made to ensure the survival of the smaller nations, as the surest bulwarks of true culture and tolerance, as the guardians of racial individuality and diversity of type, so also they in their turn must be induced to offer the fullest political and intellectual liberty to all racial minorities within their boundaries. A guarantee of linguistic rights in schools, churches, local bodies, and cultural institutions must be a sine qua non in the settlement of every problem. Thus the Germans of Bohemia and Southern Hungary must enjoy the same privileges as the Magyars in the new Roumania, the Slovenes in Italy, and the tiny group of Italians in the new Jugoslavia. Those who see their monopoly threatened by such an arrangement will describe it as Utopian, but it is certainly attainable on a basis of careful study and good intentions. 12 178 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR If Nationality is to be the dominant factor in the future settlement of Europe, two other vital factors — economics and religion — must on no account be neglect^, unless we are to court disaster. The geographical configuration of the Continent and the distribution of the various races renders some inter- national arrangement of a commercial nature an almost essential postulate of future peace. The free navigation of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus is in a special category of its own, and lies in the interests of every nation in Europe without excep- tion. If Italy should succeed in establishing her claim to Trieste, she must, alike in her own interests and in those of European peace, convert the city into a free port for all commerce. Its inclusion in the Italian tariff system would rapidly reduce a flourishing port to ruin and create an intolerable situation for its entire hinterland, besides acting as a direct challenge to Germany to upset the settle- ment at the earliest possible date ; whereas its pro- clamation as a free port would give full scope to every legitimate aspiration of German commerce in the Eastern Mediterranean. In the same way, if Fiume should become the port of the new Serbo- Croat State, some satisfactory arrangement must be made for the free access of Hungarian and Bohemian commerce to the sea. From such an arrangement each of the three States would derive great benefits, and its triangular nature would be its most effective guarantee. A similar experiment has already been successfully tried at the harbour of Salonica, where Serbia possesses a special zone of her own, exempt from Greek customs dues. It is to be hoped that Greece will voluntarily cede Kavala in return for valuable territorial expansion elsewhere ; but failing THE PAN-GERMAN PLAN 179 that, a free port and special tariff concessions for the future Struma valley railway ought to be assured to Bulgaria. Finally, in the north of Europe similar adjustments would be necessary. If, as all but a few reactionaries hope and believe, this war should bring at least a partial atonement for that greatest of political crimes, the partition of Poland, then the river system of the Vistula will resume its old importance as a geogra- phical unit, and the new Poland must inevitably obtain its outlet to the sea. The only possible way of ending the secular feud of Pole and German is to reunite the broken fragments of the Polish race and to restore the port of Danzig to its natural position as a free port. The alternative would be the cession of Danzig and at least a portion of West Prussia to the new Poland, the isolation of East Prussia from the German motherland, and the con- sequent creation of a new "Alsace-Lorraine" in the east of Europe. This would be not to undo, but merely to invert, the crime of the Polish Partition, and to produce a situation such as must inevitably lead to fresh armed conflicts. Here then is obviously a point at which wise and far-sighted commercial provisions can do much to modify acute racial antagonisms. There is indeed much to be said for some special international arrangement, on the lines of the Danube Commission, for regulating the commerce of all the riparian States with each other and with the outer world. In such cases as the Seine, the Po, or the Volga only a single State is concerned, and the problem must be regarded as one of internal policy. But Germany has as great an interest as Holland in the mouth of the Rhine, Belgium is no less interested 180 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR than Holland in the mouth of the Scheldt ; on the Elbe and the Moldau depends much of Bohemia's prosperity ; the Danube is likely to assume for Hungary an even greater importance in the future than in the past ; while the Vistula supplies the key to the Polish problem. There remains the religious problem, and nothing is more remarkable (in a war which has pitted Protestant against Protestant and Catholic against Catholic, and thus appears to many scoffers as the bankruptcy of the Christian ideal) than the silence which our public opinion has hitherto preserved on one of its most vital aspects. In the very forefront of the vast problems raised by this war is the emancipation and regeneration of the democratic and progressive Slav nations of Central Europe. Of these, five out of seven — the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, and Slovenes — arfe overwhelmingly Catholic ; the sixth, the Ruthenes, so far as they inhabit Austria-Hungary, belong to the Uniate Church ; while only the seventh, the Serbs, are Orthodox, and on them religion sits lightly, as on all Balkan peoples. This bald statement of fact should suffice to show the utter hopelessness of any attempt to solve these Slav problems on an Orthodox basis. The baneful influence of a tiny clique of reactionaries in Petrograd is being exercised in that direction ; but the overwhelming mass of the Russian people, while clinging firmly to the Orthodox faith as a living expression of their innermost soul, will fiercely resent and repudiate any attempt to sow dis- cord between Catholic and Orthodox. The Panslav ideal can only be attained by the enforcement of a religious truce ; those who would like to identify Panslavism with Orthodoxy are in reality Pan-Musco- vites, and must inevitably rely upon a policy of THE PAN-GERMAN PLAN 181 Russification. Such ideas are a reversion to the evil tendencies of the Middle Ages, to the very traditions by which German and Magyar policy is inspired, and will fail to arouse even the faintest echo among the Western and Southern Slavs, who are all deeply imbued with Western thought and culture. A classic example of the new spirit is provided by the fraternal example of the Croats and Slovenes, whose fervent Catholicism does not hinder them from ardently desiring union with their Orthodox Serb brethren, and whose tolerant attitude is more than reciprocated by the Serbian Government ]]and public opinion in Serbia. The Concordat arranged last year between Serbia and the Vatican is almost unprece- dented in modern ecclesiastical history for its far- reaching and liberal concessions. It is to be hoped that this statesmanlike act will form a precedent for Russia's attitude to all her Slavonic kinsmen under foreign rule, and that when the Russian armies again enter Lemberg, such deplorable incidents as the persecution of Monsignor Szeptycki, " the Ruthene Strossmayer," will not be repeated. That Catholics and Orthodox can live amicably side by side without any injury to the national cause is shown by the almost ideal relations which subsist between the Roumanian Uniate and Orthodox Churches in Tran- sylvania. The enthusiasm of many million Catholic Slavs in Bohemia, Hungary, and along the Adriatic coast-line, for Russia as the great Slav brother is an asset which a few fanatics must not be allowed to barter rashly away. Neither the Southern Slav nor the Bohemian nor the Polish nor the Galician ques- tions can be solved on any basis save that of a Tregua Dei between Catholicism ?nd Orthodoxy ; and as the solution of all four problems is an essential preliminary 182 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR to a durable European settlement, it lies quite as much in the interests of the Western Powers as of Russia herself, to insist upon this point of view. In order, then, to bring the principle of nationahty to its own in Europe, it will be necessary to destroy Turkey and to dismember Austria-Hungary. But to attempt to apply similar methods to Germany would be to deny, not to enforce, that same principle. The regeneration of Germany can only come from within ; it can never be imposed from without. And that regeneration must be the aim of Europe, if the future peace is not to be one long nightmare of rival arma- ments tempered by epidemics of bankruptcy. For the moment Germany is content with the Hohenzollern conception of kingship and of the State ; and any attempt on our part at interference with the internal arrangements of the Empire could only strengthen its hold upon the people. Underlying the whole struggle is a fundamental difference of mentality and outlook, and herein lies the true tragedy and the crowning danger of the situation. Only by exploding the doctrine of Materialism and Brute Force as the gospel of humanity can we hope to produce in Germany a reversion to that cult of idealism in which her people formerly led the world. It cannot be too often repeated that there is no prospect of detaching from Germany any of her three allies by anything short of overwhelming military success. The idea that the Dual Monarchy, which was rescued a year ago from disintegration by its German ally's energy and powers of reorganization, and which is now held as in a vice by the iron hand of Prussian military discipline and financial pressure, could ever be detached as a whole from the German side is altogether too fantastic to be THE PAN-GERMAN PLAN 183 discussed seriously, though there are certain Entente diplomatists who have been either ignorant or per- fidious enough to parley secretly with the notorious Count Forgach, the alter ego of the Austro- Hungarian Foreign Minister. Scarcely more plausible is the idea, still entertained in a dwindling circle of sentimentalists, that Hungary could be won to the side of the Allies. Those who argue thus forget that the Anglomania of the Magyar aristocracy, upon which they reckon, is confined to country-house life, racing and tailor's fashions, and that the glib phrases about liberty and constitution in which they so freely indulge are mere ornaments to conceal the grossest racial tyranny which modern Europe has witnessed. Budapest and Berlin are equally responsible for this war ; and on its successful issue for the Central Powers depend the last hopes of the hateful policy of Magyarization which Hungarian statesmen have pursued so fiercely since 1867. The idea that Turkey could be detached from the Central Powers belongs to another category of illu- sions. Rightly or wrongly, the main aim of Russia is the acquisition of Constantinople and free access to the Mediterranean. Rightly or wrongly, the Govern- ments of the Entente have recognized the legitimate nature of this aim and are pledged to its realization. It thus becomes obvious that a hostile country can hardly be detached from its allies by those who are pledged to deprive it of its capital. There remains Bulgaria, and here for a moment credulity, sentiment, and perfidy combined to weave a dangerous intrigue. King Ferdinand, alarmed at the reviving confidence of Greece and Roumania in the Entente cause, and fearing lest he might be taken between two fires, withdrew discreetly into a Viennese 184 GERMAN, SLAV, AND MAGYAR background, in the hope that the Entente might beheve in his elimination and enter into compromis- ing negotiations with his agents, such as he could then betray to Athens and Bucarest. Fortunately, on this occasion the Entente acted upon the maxim " Once bitten, twice shy." The politicians of Bulgaria are united as they have seldom been before. The former Russophil Malinov has reached a public understand- ing with Ferdinand's faithful henchman Radoslavov : the Anglophil Gesov has been in Berlin and Vienna, and has expressed his satisfaction with the course of the war ; Danev is isolated, and his followers have been reduced to silence by charges of high treason. The aims of Bulgaria are to-day absolutely irrecon- cilable with those of the Entente ; for the conquest of Macedonia was but a first step. The true policy of Bulgaria — of King and nation alike — is to prevent Constantinople from falling into Russian hands, to prevent Serbo-Croat unity under the Karagjorgjevi^ dynasty, and to establish Bulgaria's hegemony upon " the four seas " (Black, Marmora, ^gean, and Adri- atic). These aims are well known to all students of Bulgarian politics, and are startlingly illustrated by the political Memorandum issued officially by the Govern- ment of Sofia last October in 20,000 copies, and soon afterwards published in Germany.^ This document is perhaps the most cynical exposition of Realpolitlk which the war has produced. It compares, with the precision of a chemist weighing drugs, the rival offers of the two belligerent groups, and proves beyond question that the Central Powers offered a higher price for a smaller effort. It openly affirms that the bargain ' See " Die Wirtschaftliche Anniiherung zwischen dem deutschen Reiche und seinen Verbiindeten," edited by Dr. H. Herkner (in vol. civ of Verein fiir Sozialpolitik). THE PAN-GERMAN PLAN 185 includes the promise not only of all Southern Serbia, but of all the territory necessary to secure to Bulgaria a frontier with Hungary. Its justification for this policy of partition is the blunt assertion that " No one can at one and the same time consider the interests of Serbia and Bulgaria, for this is an impossibility, and not even desired by Bulgaria." The repeated declarations of prominent Bulgarian statesmen and generals amply confirm this attitude. Bulgaria is far too deeply imbued with the spirit of Prussian hegemony ever to renounce her alliance with the Central Powers until there is over- whelming military proof to show that she has espoused a losing cause. Among all the thorny problems which await solution at the close of this war, few are more thorny than that of the future relations of Serbia and Bulgaria. For that very reason it is essential, in the interests of peace in South-eastern Europe, to place these relations upon a sure foundation. But to this there are three necessary preliminaries — the expulsion of the Coburg dynasty from Sofia, the final establish- ment of Russian influence at Constantinople, and the dissolution of the Dual Monarchy. The elimination of Austro-Magyar intrigue which would naturally follow from such an upheaval, and the achievement of Serbo-Croat unity, would turn the energies of Serbia westwards to that seacoast from which she has so long been artificially shut off ; and the Macedonian question would rapidly assume its true dimensions, as a matter of local importance and a fitting subject of local compromise. The creation of a Serbo-Bulgarian Customs-Union would place the Vardar Valley at the disposal of both races ; the new Bulgarian port of Elefteia would soon supersede Kavala, and the recovery of Adrianople and the Thrac'in pl!ain WO.ild 186 GERMAN, SLAY, AND MAGYAR provide an ample field for colonization and expansion. The future must make amends for the errors of the past, and not be compromised by fresh sins in the present. The time will assuredly come when the ideal of Strossmayer and Michael Obrenovic will be fully realized, and the Bulgars will help their Serb, Croat, and Slovene brethren to achieve Jugoslav Unity in its fullest geographical sense. But such aims can only be attained by a slow and painful process, and from the course of events it is abundantly obvious that unity on the West must precede reconciliation on the East. The twentieth century is the century of the Slav, and it is one of the main tasks of the war to emanci- pate the hitherto despised, unknown, or forgotten Slavonic democracies of Central and Southern Europe. If the Poles, the Czecho-Slovaks, and the Jugoslavs succeed in reasserting their right to independent national development, and to that close and cordial intercourse with the West to which they have always aspired, they will become so many links between the West and their Russian kinsmen, and will restore to Europe that idealism which Prussian materialist doctrine was rapidly crushing out. Our task is nothing less than the regeneration of Europe, the vindication of the twin principles of Nation- ality and Democracy, the emancipation of subject races from alien rule. Restore Belgium, reunite Alsace-Lorraine to France, but ignore the agony of Poland, the irresistible movement for Southern Slav Unity, the new and hopeful dream of an Italian Italy, the growing resolve of Bohemia, the aspirations of the Roumanians, Slovaks, and Ruthenes, the impossible nature of Turkish rule, the vital need for Balkan co-operation, the overwhelming claims of Russia to an access to the Mediterranean — and in so doing you THE PAN-GERMAN PLAN 187 are giving your vote for the old Europe of reaction and materialism, and selling your birthright in the new and transfigured Europe of our dreams. Establish one nation supreme over the Continent, controlling the destinies of a whole group of its neigh- bours, and you most surely inaugurate a new era of armaments and racial strife, accentuated tenfold by revolution, bankruptcy, and social upheaval. The theory of racial domination, whether it be Prussian, Magyar, Turk, or Bulgarian, must be replaced by a programme of free and untrammelled development for every race. The supernation must follow the superman into the limbo of history. Half-measures are for times of peace : to-day we must build on broad foundations, not waste our time upon the scaffolding of a house which has been con- demned as unsafe. But where is the master-builder ? That is our greatest need to-day. The nation has already shown, during this war, that it can respond to a clear call ; and in the great problem of munitions at least one man has shown himself ready to lead us. But in Foreign Policy the same lead is urgently needed — no longer the silence of pessimism or cau- tion which has weighed upon our spirits during the past six months, but the gallant and incisive phrases with which our statesmen roused our enthusiasm in the early stages of the war. Britain must prove true to her mission as the soul of the Entente — not as the exponent of some new-fangled " English Culture," but as the champion of those wider principles of mutual tolerance without which neither a healthy national life nor healthy international relations are possible. BIBLIOGRAPHY The following is a selected list of books in English, French, and German, dealing with Central European problems, and does not claim to be in any way complete : — CHAPTER I. AuERBACH, Bertran'd. Lcs Raccs et les Nationaiites en Autriche-Hongrie. Paris, 1898. Bahr, Hermann. Wien. Stuttgart, 1906. Bauer, Otto. Die Nationalitatenfrage und die Sozialdemo- kra,tie. Vienna, 1908. Bidermann, L. Geschichte der osterreichischen Gesammtstaats- idee (1526-1804). 2 vols. Innsbruck, 1869. Charmatz, Richard. Oesterreichs innere Politik. 2 vols. 1909. Oesterreichs auswartige Politik. 2 vols. 1912. Chervin, Arthur. L'Autriche et la Hongriede Domain. Paris, 1915- Drage, Geoffrey. Austria-Hungary, London, 1909. Dudan, a. La Monarchia degli Absburgo. 2 vols. Rome, 1915. Eisenmann, Louis. Le Compromis Austro-Hongrois de 1867. Paris, 1904. Friedjung, Heinrich. Oesterreich von 1848 bis i860. 2 vols. Stuttgart, igo8-ii. Gayda, Virginio. Modern Austria. London, 1915. GuMPLOWicz, L. Das Recht der Nationalitiiten und Sprachen in Oesterreich-Ungarn. Innsbruck, 1879. Henry, Rene. Questions d' Autriche-Hongrie. Paris, 1903. KoLMER, G. Parlament und Verfassung in Oesterreich. 7 vols. Vienna, 1902-14. Kralik, Richard VON. Oesterreichische Geschichte. Vienna, 1913. Leger, Louis. Histoire de I'Autriche-Hongrie. Paris, 1895. LuscHiN VON Ebengreuth. Oesterreichische Reichsgeschichte. Bamberg, 1896. Mahaffy, J. P. Francis Joseph I. London, 1915. Palacky, F. Oesterreichs Staatsidee. Prag, 1876. Samassa, Paul. Der Volkerstreit im Habsburger Reiche. Leip- zig, 191 1, SosNOSKY, Theodor VON. Die Politik im Habsburger Reiche. 2 vols. Berlin, 1913. 188 BIBLIOGRAPHY 189 Springer, Anton. Geschichte Oesterreichs. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1863. Springer, Rudolf (Carl Renner). Grundlagen und Entwick- lungsziele der oesterreichisch-ungarischen Monarchic. Vienna, iqo6. Steed, H. W, The Habsburg Monarchy. London, 1912. Wertheimer, E. von. Graf Julius Andrassy. 3 vols. Stutt- gart, 1913. Whitman, Sidney. The Realm of the Habsburgs. London, 1892. CHAPTERS II AND III. Andrassy, Count Julius, jun. The Development of Hungarian Constitutional Liberty. London, 1908. Ungarns Ausgleich mit Oesterreich. Leipzig, 1897. Boner, Charles. Transylvania. London, 1865. Brote, Eugen. Die rumanische Frage in Ungarn v Sieben- burgen, Berlin, 1896. Eotvos, Baron Joseph. Die Nationalitatenfrage. Pest, 1865. Horvath, M. 25 Jahre aus der Geschichte Ungarns. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1867. HuNFALVY, Paul. Die Rumilnen und ihre Anspriiche. Vienna, 18S3. Hungaricus. Das magyarische Ungarn und der Dreibund. Munich, 1899. Iranyi, D. and Chassin. Histoire Politique de la Revolution en Hongrie. 2 vols. Paris (N.D.). Jaray, G. Louis. La question sociale en Hongrie. Paris, 1909. Knatchbull-Hugesson, Hon. C. M. The Political Evolution of the Hungarian Nation. 2 vols. London, 1909. Kossuth, Louis. Memoirs of My Exile. London, 1880. Marczali, H. Ungarisches Verfassungsrecht. Tubingen, 1911. Ungarische Verfassungsgeschichte. Tiibingen, 1911. Patterson, A. J. The Magyars. 2 vols. London, 1869. Popovici, AUREL. Die vereinigten Staaten von Gross-Oester- reich. Leipzig, 1906. Sayous, E. Histoire Generale des Hongrois. Paris. No date. Seton-Watson, R. W. Racial Problems in Hungary. London, 1908. Corruption and Reform in Hungary. London, 191 1. Roumania and the Great War. London, 1915. TiMON, A. VON. Ungarische Verfassungs- und Rechtsgeschichte. Berlin, 1904. CHAPTER IV. Barby, Henri. Les Victoires Serbes. Paris, 1913. Bregalnitsa. Paris, 1913. L'epopec serbe. Paris, 1916. Berard, Victor. La Serbie. Paris, 1915. 190 BIBLIOGRAPHY Denton, Rev. W. Servia and the Servians. London, 1862. Forbes, Nevill (and others). The Balkans. Oxford, 1915. Georgewitsch, Vladan. Die Serbische Frage. Stuttgart, 1909. Das Ende der Obrenovitch. Leipzig, 1905. Kallay, Benjamin VON. Geschichte der Serben. Budapest, 1878. Mallat, J. La Serbie Contemporaine. Paris, 1902. MiJATOVic, Chedo. Servia of the Servians. London, 191 x. MiLAKOVic. Storia del Montenero. Ragusa, 1877. Miller, W. The Ottoman Empire. Cambridge, 1913. NovAKOVic, Stojan. Die Wiedergeburt des Serbischen Staates (1804-1813). Sarajevo, 1912. PicoT, Emile. Les Serbes de la Hongrie. Prague, 1873, Racic, F. Le Royaume de Serbie. Paris, 1901. Ranke, Leopold von. History of Servia. London, 1853 (2nd ed. German, 1879). Stead, Alfred (Ed.). Servia by the Servians. London, 1909. Urquhart, David. Fragment of the History of Servia. Lon- don, 1843. Velimirovic, Father Nicholas. Rehgion and Nationality in Serbia. London, 1915. Serbia's Place in Human History. London, 1915. The Soul of Serbia. London, 1916. Vivian, Herbert. Servia, the Poor Man's Paradise. London, 1897. Yakshitch, G. L'Europe et la Resurrection de la Serbie. Paris, 1907. CHAPTER V. Civis Italicus. Italy and the Jugoslav Peoples. London, 1916. CviJic, Professor J. L' Annexion de la Bosnie et la Question Serbe. Paris, 1909. Denis, Ernest. La Grande Serbie. Paris, 1915. Diplomatist, A. Nationalism and War in the Near East. Oxford, 1915. Erber, Tullio. Storia della Dalmazia. Zara, 1886. Evans, Sir Arthur J. Through Bosnia on Foot. 2nd ed. London, 1877. FouRNiER, A. Wie wir zu Bosnian Kamen. Vienna, 1909. Jackson, Sir Thomas G. Dalmatia, the Quarnero and Istria. 3 vols. Oxford, 1887. Lanux, Pierre de. La Yougoslavie. Paris, 1916. Laveleye, Emile de. The Balkan Peninsula. Preface by W. E. Gladstone. London, 1886. Leger, Louis. Serbes, Croatcs, et Bulgares. Paris, 1913. LoiSEAU, Charles. Le Balkan Slave et la Crise Autrichienne. Paris, 1898. L'equilibre Adriatique. Paris, 1901. Masaryk, ProfessorT.G. Vasic-Forgach-Aehrenthal. Prag, 191 1. Prezzolini, G. La Dalmazia. Rome, 1915. BIBLIOGRAPHY 191 Seton- Watson, R. W. The Southern Slav Question and the Habsburg Monarchy. London, 191 1. Greatly enlarged German edition, Berlin, 1913. Absolutism in Croatia. London, 1912. The Balkans, Italy, and the Adriatic. London, 1915. Southern Slav Library, The. i. The Southern Slav Programme. 2. The Southern Slavs : Land and People. 3. A Sketch of Southern Slav History. 4. Southern Slav Culture. London, 1915. Spalajkovic, M. La Bosnie et I'Herzegovine. Paris, 1899. Vellay, Charles. La Question de I'Adriatique. Paris, 1915. ViLLARi, LuiGi. The Republic of Ragusa. London, 1904. Zagorsky, Vladimir. Frangois Racki et la Renaissance scien- tifique et politique de la Croatie (1828-1894). Paris, 1909. CHAPTER VL Andler, Charles. Les Origines du Pan-Germanisme (1800- 1888). Paris, 1915. Le Pan-Germanisme Continentale sous Guillaume IL Paris, 1915. Le Pan-Germanisme colonial sous Guillaume IL Paris, 1915. Arndt, Ernst Moritz. Der Geist der Zeit. 4 Bde. 1892. Bismarck, Prince. Reflections and Reminiscences. 2 vols. London, 1899. BuLOW, Dietrich von. Geist des neucrn Kriegssystems. BuLOW, Prince. Imperial Germany. London, 1914. Cheradame, Andre. L'Europe et la Question d'Autriche. Paris, 1906. La Question d'Oricnt. Le Chemin de fer de Bagdad. Paris, 1903. Denis, Ernest. Lafondationdel'Empire Allemand, Paris, 1906. Deutschland bei Beginn des XXten Jahrhunderts. Berlin, 1900. Deutschlands Anspriiche an das tiirkischc Erbe. Munich, 1896. GrossdeutschlandundMilteleuropaumdasJahr 1950. Berlin, 1895. Headlam, J. W. Bismarck. London, 1904. Jahn, Friedrich LUDWiG. Deutsches Volkstum. (Ed. Reclam.) Kannenberg. Kleinasiens Naturschtitze. Berlin, 1897. Kaerger, — . Kleinasien, ein deutsches Kolonisationsfeld. Lagarde, Paul. Deutsche Schriften, 1886. List, Friedrich. Gesammclte Schriften. 1850. Matter, Paul. Bismarck et son Temps. 3 vols. Paris, 1912. Meinecke, F. Weltbiirgertum und Nationalstaat. Munich, 1911. Moltke, Hellmuth VON. Gesammelte Schriften und Denk- wiirdigkeiten. 1881. Moysset, Henri, L'esprit public en AUemagne. Paris, 1911. Naumann, Friedrich. Deutschland und Ocsterrcich. Berlin, 1900. Mitteleuropa. Berlin, 191$. 192 BIBLIOGRAPHY Oesterreichs Zusammenbruch und Wiederaufbau, Munich, 1899. Pan-German Doctrine, Tlie, London, 1904. Proll,K. DieKampfeder DeutsclieninOesterreich. Berlin, 1890. Prothero, G. W. German Opinion and German Policy before the War. .London, 1916. Rachfahl, E. Kaiser und Reich (1888-1913). Berlin, 1913. Reventlow, Graf Ernst. Der Vampir des Festlandes. Ber- lin, 1915. Deutschlands auswartige Politik. Berlin, 1914. Kaiser Wilhelm II und die Byzantiner. Berlin, 1906. Reimer, G. Ein Pangermanisches Deutschland. 1905. Rohrbach, Paul. Der deutsche Gedanke in der Welt. Leip- zig, 1912. Deutschland unter den Weltvolkern. 191 1. Die Bagdadbahn. 1902. Sprenger, Alois. Babylonien, das reichste Land in der Vorzeit. 1886. Treitschke, H.voN. Deutsche Geschichte. 5 vols. Leipzig, 1897. Historische und politische Aufsatze. 4 vols. Leipzig, 1903. Politik. 2 vols. Leipzig, 191 1. Weil, Georges. Le Pangermanisme en Autriche. Paris, 1904. Welschinger, Henri. Bismarck (1815-1898). Paris, 1912. CHAPTER Vn. Baker, James. Austria : her People and Homeland. London, 1912. Balch, Emily G. Our Slavic Fellow Citizens. New York, 1909. Bourlier, J. Les Tcheques et la Boheme Contemporaine. Paris, 1893. Capek, Thomas. The Slovaks of Hungary. New York, 1906. Bohemia under Habsburg Misrule. New York, 1915. Denis, Ernest. La Boheme depuis la Montague Blanche. 2 vols. Paris, 1903. Leger, Louis. La Boheme. Paris, 1878. LiJTZow, Count Francis. Bohemia : an Historical Sketch. London, 1909. Master John Hus. London, 1909. The Hussite Wars. London, 1914. Maurice, C. E. Bohemia (" Story of the Nations "). London, 1896. Monroe, W. S. Bohemia and the Czechs. Boston, 1910. Schwarze, W. N. John Hus, the Martyr of Bohemia. New York, 1915. Unterdriickung der Slovaken durch die Magyaren. Prag, 1903. Vlach, Jaroslav. Die Cecho-Slaven. Vienna, 1883. INDEX Abdul Hamid, 150 Accurti, 95 Adriatic, 51, 61, 103, 142 Aehrenthal, Count, 49, 80, 96 Agram Treason Trial, 94-5 Albania, 55, 103 Alexander, Crown Prince, 118 Alexander, King of Serbia, 76 Alexander Karagjorgjevic, 69 Alexander of Bulgaria, 74, 141 Alsace-Lorraine, 140, 145, 176 Anatolia, 149 Andrass)', Count Julius, 33, 72, 89, 159, 164 Andrassy, Count, jun., 39 Angora, 149 Antivari, 73 Apponyi, Count, 41 Army, Austro-Hungarian, 13 Arnold, Thomas, 171 Arpad dynasty, 18 Artstetten, 113 Asia Minor, 149 Auffenberg, 105 Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, 36 Ausgleich, Austro-Hungarian, 16, 32, 34 Ausgleich, Hungaro-Croatian, 36, 89, 90 Azev, 99 Babylonia, 149 Bach, Alexander, 14 Bagdad Railway, 149, 150 Bahr, Hermann, 128 Bakunin, 108 Balkan League, 100, 108 Baltic state, 172 Banat of Temesvdr, 69, 90 Banffy, Baron, 45 Belgium, 49, 57, 141 Belgrade, 18, 22, 50, 60, 64, 65, 97, 105, 112 Belgrade, Treaty of, 64 Benedek, General, 13 Berchtold, Count, 99, 167 "Berlin-Bagdad," 117, 124, 142, 148, 173 Berlin, Treaty of, 73, 74, 80 Bernhardi, General, 139, 142 Bethmann-HoUweg, 80, 147 Beust, 34 Bismarck, 34, 128, 129, 149 Bley, Fritz, 143 Bogomils, 56 Bohemia, 19, 21, 34, 128, 135, 151-170, 174 Boletinac, Isa, 104 Bosnia, 55, 56, 63, 70, 73, 79, 109 Brandenburg, 135 Briinn, 161 Brute Force, 29, 182 Bryce, Lord, 153 Bucarest, 60 Buda, 20, 22, 24, 62, 82 Budapest, 32, 61, 94, 109, 164 Bulgaria, 102, 108, 120, 174, 184 Billow, Dietrich von, 138 Byzantium, 52, 55 Carniola, 61 Catherine H, 59, 64 Catholic Church, 14, 21, 181 Ccch, Svatopluk, 159 Celakovsky, 157 Centralism, 32 13 193 194 INDEX Cetinje, 96 Chamberlain, H. S,, 29, 143 Charles IV, Emperor, 152 • Charles X, 68 Cheradame, M. Andre, 171 Choc, 168 Clausewitz, 138 Coalition, Serbo-Croat, 93, 97' Colonial Society, German, 133 Colours, national, 43 Concordat, Serbian, 113, 181 Constantinople, 18, 61, 150, 172, 183 Constitution, Hungarian, 22 Couza, Alexander, 71 -; Croatia, 27, 36, 53, 82, 89, 174 Cuvaj, loi, no Cyril, St., 17, 88 Czechs, 34, 128, 136, 141, 144, 147. 151-70; 180 Dahis, the, 66 Dalmatia, 10, 18, 54, 88, 103, 106 Danev, Dr., 184 Danicic, George, 86 Danilo I, 58, 70 Danube, 10, 139 Danzig, 179 Dardanelles, 178 Deak, Francis, 32, 33, 36, 89, 159 Deiani, 55 Delegations, Austro-Hungarian, 15 Denis, M., 78 Deutsche Bank, 149, 150 Deutsche Ostmarkenverein, 133 Deutsche Schulverein, 132 Dibra, 108 Djakovo, 88 Dobrovsky, 156 Draga, Queen, 77 Drang nach Osten,^g, 117, 136, 173 Dual Alliance, 128 Dual System, 15, 24, 32, 34, 109 Diirich, Mr., 167 Dusan, Stephen, 54-6, 108 Dvorak, 160 Eastern Question, 9 Education, Hungarian, 40-1 Eisenmann, M., 20 Electoral System, Hungarian, 44 Enver Pasha, 122 Eotvos, Baron, 33, 37 Erben, 157 Eugene, Prince, 22, 62 Evans, Sir Arthur, 60 Fadejev, General, 9, 151 Faynor, Stephen, 43 Federalism, 32, 34, 158 Ferdinand I, 20 Ferdinand of Bulgaria, 79, 100, 108, 172, 183 Fibich, 160 Fichte, 137 Finland, 145 Fiume, 89, 93, 178 Forgach, Count, 99, 103, 105, 115. 183 Francis Ferdinand, Archduke, 14,50, 109-112 Francis I, 12, 26 Francis Joseph, Emperor, 12, 31, 32, 34. 79' "o» 164 Frankfurt, 127, 158 Frederick, Archduke, 167 Frederick the Great, 25 French Revolution, 25 Fried] ung, Dr., 96-7, 116 Frobenius, Colonel, 139 Gaj, Ljudcvit, 83, 84 Galicia, 10 Garasanin, 70 Gentry, Magyar, 15 INDEX 195 Gcrmanization, 31, 135, 141, 144, 155, 168, 174 Gladstone, 88 Glagolitic rite, 88 Goethe, 132 Golden Bull, 16, 22, 24 Goltz, von der, 150 Gortakov, 73 Gottingen, 139 Grafianica, 55 Granicars, 62 Great Austrian idea, 14 Gregory VII, 53 Grey, Sir E., 106, 108, 115, 116 Grimm, 85 Grosswardein, 42 Grothc, Hugo, 150 Gundulic, Ivan, 60, 83 Gustav-Adolf-Verein, 132 Habsburg, House of, 10, 20, 128, 154 Hague Tribunal, 115 Hakatists, 133 Kartwig, Mr., 106 Hasse, Dr., 134 Hermannstadt, 43 Hinkovic, Dr., 119 Historic Right, 29 Hluboka, 42 Hodonin, 160 Hohenbcrg, Duchess of, ili Hohenwart, Count, 164 Hohcnzollern, House of, 145, 164 Holland 138, 141, 147, 179 Hunyady, John, 18 H urban, J. M., 42 H urban, Svctozar, 42 Hus, John, 153, 158 Hussites, 154 Ignatiev, 73 Istria. 88 Ivo Crnojcvic, 58 Izvolsky, Mr,, 80 Jahn,, 137, 138 JelaciC, Baron, 86 Jesuits, 12, 21, 63, 154 Jews, 15, 141 John of Bohemia, 152 Joseph II, 25, 64, 155 Jugoslav Committee, 11 8-9 Jugoslav idea, 70, 92, 118, 186 Jukic, loi Jungmann, 156 Kaerger, 149 Kara George, 65-7 Karagjorgjevic dynasty, 184 Kannenberg, 149 Karlowitz, Treaty of, 63 Katalinic, Mr., 106 Kavala, 185 Khevenhiiller, Count, 75 Khuen-Hedervary, Count, 91 Kiderlen-Waechter, Herr von, 104 Klagenfurt, 106 Klofac, Mr., 166 Knin, 53 Koehlci-, Ernst, 145 Kollar, Jan, 156 Komensky, 155, 162 Koniggriitz, 13, 32, 34 Konopischt, Pact of, iii Konrad voa Hotzendorff, 104 Korncr, Theodor von, 131, 137 Kosovo, battle of, 18, 56, 102, 155 Kossuth, Francis, 93 KosLuth, Louis, 19, 27, 30, 33, 45,85 Kragujevac, 68 Kramaf, Dr., 16; i-Jri^ani^, 83 K' bctik, i6o 196 INDEX Kumanovo, 102 Kurucz, 22 Lagarde, Paul, 139 Laibach, 83 Lassalle, 149 Laveleye, 87 Lazar, Tsar, 56 Lemberg, 181 Leopold I, 63 Leopold II, 25, 64 Lepanto, 60 Liberation, German War of, 131. 137 Lissa, 13 List, Friedrich, 137, 138 Liszt, Franz von, 49 Ljubica, Princess, 67 Louis of Baden, 62 Lovcen, Mount, 123 Lueger, Dr., 14 Lunjevica, Nikodem, 77 Luther, 153 Liitzow, Count, 154 Luxemburg, 152 Macchio, Baron, 105 Magyarization, 26, 36, 41 Magyar war, a, 1 1 Malinov, 184 Mamelukes, 91 Manes, 160 March Laws, 17, 28 Marcks, Erich, 129 Maria Theresa, 12, 22, 25, 64^ 155 Markovid, Professor, 97 Masaryk, Professor, 98, 161, 166-7 Matica Ceska, 157 Matthias Corvinus, 19 Maximilian I, 12 Mazzini, 137 MeStrovid, Ivan, 48, 119 Methodius, St., 17, 52 Metternich, 12, 26, 157 Michael, Prince, 68, 70, 186 Milan, King, 71, 74, 75, 77 Mileti(5, Svetozar, 90 Military Frontiers, 61, 82 Milo§, Prince, 66-7 Minghetti, Marco, 87 Minorities, racial, 177 Mitteleuropa, 141, 147-8, 172 Mohdcs, 16, 20, 61 Mohammed II, 56 Moltke, Hellmuth von, 139 Montenegro, 55, 58-9, 79, 114 Morava, 49, 57 Moravian Brethren, 155 Miiller-Holm, 49 Murad I, 56 Napoleon I, 60, 83, 139 Napoleon III, 32 Nastic, George, 95 Nathalie, Queen, 75 Nationalities, Law of, 37-42, 45 Nationality, 26, 27, 29 Naumann, Friedrich, 40. 137, 147-8 Navy Bill, German, 134 Nemanja, Stephen, 53 Nenadovid, Aleksa, 65 Nicholas of Montenegro, 72 Nicopolis, 18 Niksic, 73 Novibazar, 50, 73 Olmiitz, 169 Omladina, 71 Orthodox Church, 62, 88, loi, 180 Ottokar, 151 Palacky, Francis, 32, 156, 157-8 Palestine, 139 Pan-German League, 134, 143 INDEX 197 Pan-Slavism, 83, 142, 151, 156, 180 Pasid, Mr., 79, 100, 105 Peter, King, 59 Peter, Vladika, 86 Peter IIT, 59 Peter the Great, 59 Peters, Dr. Carl, 134 Petrovic dynasty, 58 Piedmont, 50 " Pig War," 79 Pi] sen, 162 Pinsk, 140 Podiebrad, George, 19, 154 Poles, 19, 35, 112, 141, 142, 147, 158, 170, 174, 179 Pomerania, 135 Posen, 141, 145, 176 Potiorek, General, 112 Pozarevac, 63 Pragmatic Sanction, 16, 24, 35 Prague, 152, 154, 160, 168 Pressburg, 20 Prizren, 103 Prochaska, 99, 103 Protestantism, 21 Pulszky, Francis, 31 Pupin, Prof., 119 Radicals, Serbian, 78 Radoslavov, 184 Ragusa, 55, 60, 83, 107 RajaCic, Patriarch, 69, 86 Ranke, Leopold von, 54 Ranch, Baron, 94, 100 Ravanicr., 55 Reichspost, 97, 104 Rcichstadt, 72 Reimer, Gcorg, 143, 144 Reinsurance Treaty, 128 Renncr, Dr. Carl, 30 Revcntlow, Count, 142 Rieger, 162 Ristid, Jovan, 71 Robert Guiscard, 53 Rodbertus, 149 Rohrbach, Paul, 148, 150 Roscher, 148 Rotterdam, 142 Roumanians, 19, 42, 49,73, 11 1, 174, 181 Roumelia, Eastern, 74 Rudolf of Habsburg, 151 Russia, 59, 6t, 73, 130, 169, 174 Safafik, 157 Salonica, 117, 178 S. Girolamo, 88 S. Stefano, 73 Sarajevo, 18, 60, iii, 112 Sarolea, Dr., 171 Sava, St., 54 Save, 52, 69 Savov, General, 108 Saxons, 36 Sazonov, Mr., 117 Scheiner, Dr., 167 Scheldt, 129, 180 Schiemann, Prof., 148 Schidzvereine, 133 Siemens, Dr., 150 Sigismund, Emperor, 18 Skoda, 79, 162 Skoplje, 60 Skupstina, 68 Slav Congress, 167 Slavonia, 11 Slivnica, 102 Slovakj;, 20, 41, 43, ni, 144, 158, 160 Slovenes, 177 Slovenski Jug, 98 Smctana, 160 Sofia, 18, 60 Sokols, 167, 168 Sorel, Albert, 9 Spalato, 53, 106 Sprenger, Alois, 149 198 INDEX Staatsrecht, 30 Stahremberg, 62 Steed, Mr., 105 Stein, Baron, 137 Stephen, Prvencani, 54 Stephen, St., 18, 19 Stephen the Little, 59 Strossmayer, Bishop, 70, 86-8, 186 Struma, 179 Studenica, 55 Sumadija, 51, 65 Supilo, Mr., 119 Swientochowski, 98 Sybel, H. von, 137 Szechenyi, Count, 26 Szell, Coleman, 45 Szeptycki, Archbishop, 181 Tannenberg, 153 Tarabocchia, 95 Tarnowski, Count, 108 Tegetthoff, Admiral, 13 Thirty Years' War, 155 Thun, Prince, 168 Tisza, Coloman, 30, 37, 45, 91 Tisza, Count Stephen, 45, 100, 108, 119 Tomasic, 100 Tomek, 154 Transylvania, 20, 28, 37, 125, 136, 181 Treitschke, 29, 132, 141 Trialism, 109 Trieste, 104, 165 Triple Alliance, 104, 165 Trumbic, Dr., 119 Tschirschky, Herr von, 100, 115 Turks, 24, 57, 65, 139, 140, 173, 183 Ukraine, the, 142, 145 Uniate Church, 180 Urach, 83 Uprka, Joseph, 160 UZice, 54, 70 Vardar, 57, 185 Varna, 18 Vasic, 98 Venice, 60 Vidin, 60 Vienna, Congress of, 127 Vistula, 178 Vladisavic, 58 Vladislav of Hungary, 18 Vodnik, 83 Voivodina, 69 Vranja, 73 Vrhlicky, 159 Vuk Karadzic, 85 Wallachia, 64 Warsaw?, 9 Wekerle, Dr., 39 Wenceslas, 157 Wends, 135 White Mountain, 155 William I, 128 William II, 30, 46, 96, 112, i3o-i» i34> 140. 149. 171 Winterstetten, Karl von, 142 Zadruga, 53 Zagreb, 83, 88, loi, no Zara, 93, 107 Zivkovic, Gen., 104 Zizka, 154 ZoUverein, 47, 129 UmVIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON BY THE SAME AUTHOR The War and Democracy (Jointly with J. 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