multitudes of innocent victims were to be sacrificed to the
insatiate hunger for blood of the modern Moloch?

Here are questions which few are capable of answering. Ostensible
answers may be given, surface causes, reasons of immediate
potency. But no one will be willing to accept these as the true
moving causes. For a continent to spring in a week's time from
complete peace into almost universal war, with all the great and
several of the small Powers involved, is not to be explained by
an apothegm or embraced within the limits of a paragraph. If not
all, certainly several of these nations had enmities to be
unchained, ambitions to be gratified, long-hidden purposes to be
put in action. They seemed to have been awaiting an opportunity,
and it came when the anger of the Servians at the seizure of
Bosnia by Austria culminated in a mad act of assassination

ASSASSINATION OF THE AUSTRIAN CROWN PRINCE

The immediate cause, so far as apparent to us, of the war in
question was the murder, on June 29, 1914, of the Austrian Crown
Prince Francis Ferdinand and his wife, while on a visit to
Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, the assassin being a Servian
student, supposed to have come for that purpose from Belgrade,
the Servian capital. The inspiring cause of this dastardly act
was the feeling of hostility towards Austria which was widely
entertained in Servia. Bosnia was a part of the ancient kingdom
of Servia. The bulk of its people are of Slavic origin and speak
the Servian language. Servia was eager to regain it, as a
possible outlet for a border on the Mediterranean Sea. When,
therefore, in 1908, Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, which