Austria a start in the conflict already long designed. Military
measures were being taken secretly, stores of ammunition overhauled,
and all done that should be necessary for a war which was premeditated
in Berlin, half-feared, half-desired in Vienna, and dated for the end
of July--after the harvest.

The Government of Berlin was, during the whole of this period,
actively engaged in forcing Austria forward in a path to which she was
not unwilling; and, at last, upon the 23rd of July, Europe was amazed
to read a note sent by the Imperial Governor at Vienna to the Royal
Government in the Servian capital of Belgrade, which note was of a
kind altogether unknown hitherto in the relations between Christian
States. This note demanded not only the suppression of patriotic, and
therefore anti-Austrian, societies in Servia (the assassins of the
Crown Prince had been, as I have said, not Servian but Austrian
subjects), but the public humiliation of the Servian Government by an
apology, and even an issue of the order of the day to the Servian
Army, so recently victorious, abasing that army to the worst
humiliation. The note insisted upon a specific pledge that the Servian
Government should renounce all hope of freeing the Servian nation as a
whole from foreign government, and in many another clause subjected
this small nation to the most thorough degradation ever suggested by a
powerful European people towards a lesser neighbour.

So far, though an extreme hitherto unknown in European history had
been reached, the matter was one of degree. Things of the same sort,
less drastic, had been known in the past.

But what was novel in the note, and what undoubtedly proceeded from
the suggestion of the Prussian Government (which was in all this the