always suffered at the danger-point of _Servia_. Servia was the Slav
State millions of whose native population were governed against their
will by Austro-Hungarian officials. Servia was the Slav State mortally
wounded by the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. And Servia was
the Slav State which Austria had in particular mortified by forbidding
her access to the Adriatic, and by imposing upon her an unnatural
boundary, even after her great victories of the Balkan War.

The heir to the Hapsburgs--the man who, seeing the great age of his
uncle, might at any moment ascend the throne--was the Archduke
Francis. He had for years pursued one consistent policy for the
aggrandizement of his House, which policy was the pitting of the
Catholic Slavs against the Orthodox Slavs, thereby rendering himself
in person particularly odious to the Orthodox Serbs, so many of whose
compatriots and co-religionists were autocratically governed against
their will in the newly annexed provinces.

To the capital of these provinces, Sarajevo, he proceeded in state in
the latter part of last June, and there, through the emissaries of
certain secret societies (themselves Austrian subjects, but certainly
connected with the population of independent Servia, and, as some
claimed, not unconnected with the Servian Government itself), he was
assassinated upon Saturday, the 28th of June, 1914.

For exactly a month, the consequences of this event--the provocation
which it implied to Austria, the opportunity which it gave the
Hapsburgs for a new and more formidable expression of Germanic power
against the Slavs--were kept wholly underground. _That is the most
remarkable of all the preliminaries to the war._ There was a month of
silence after so enormous a moment. Why? In order to give Germany and