another constitution and for a time attempted to work with a coalition
ministry; but this failed, and a term of reaction with pro-Austrian
tendencies, which were favoured by the king and queen, set in. This
reaction, combined with the growing disorganization of the finances and
the general sense of the discredit and failure which the follies of its
rulers had during the last thirty years brought on the country; completely
undermined the position of the dynasty and made a catastrophe inevitable.
This occurred, as is well known, on June 10, 1903, when, as the result of
a military conspiracy, King Alexander, the last of the Obrenovi['c]
dynasty, his wife, and her male relatives were murdered. This crime was
purely political, and it is absurd to gloss it over or to explain it
merely as the result of the family feud between the two dynasties. That
came to an end in 1868, when the murder of Kara-George in 1817 by the
agency of Milo[)s] Obrenovi['c] was avenged by the lunatic assassination
of the brilliant Prince Michael Obrenovi['c] III. It is no exaggeration to
say that, from the point of view of the Serbian patriot, the only
salvation of his country in 1903 lay in getting rid of the Obrenovi['c]
dynasty, which had become pro-Austrian, had no longer the great gifts
possessed by its earlier members, and undoubtedly by its vagaries hindered
the progress of Serbia both in internal and external politics. The
assassination was unfortunately carried out with unnecessary cruelty, and
it is this fact that made such a bad impression and for so long militated
against Serbia in western Europe; but it must be remembered that
civilization in the Balkans, where political murder, far from being a
product of the five hundred years of Turkish dominion, has always been
endemic, is not on the same level in many respects as it is in the rest of
Europe. Life is one of the commodities which are still cheap in backward
countries.

Although King Alexander and his wife can in no sense be said to have