(Ausgleich) of 1867. It was a work of haste and expediency and bound with
it the fate of the dynasty. Thereafter, the German minority in Austria and
the Magyar minority in Hungary were the decisive factors in the problems
confronting the Jugo-Slavs. Dalmatia was handed over to Austria; Croatia,
by a compromise, which it has never really accepted, to Hungary.

The Ausgleich between Austria and Hungary and Hungary and Croatia opened in
1868 a period which ended in 1905--it was a period, on the one hand of the
greatest decay and decomposition in the political life of the Jugo-Slavs,
and, on the other, of the greatest literary and intellectual unity as
shaped by Bishop Strossmayer and Peter II and Nicholas of Montenegro.

Bishop Strossmayer and the Slovene, Croat, and Serb academies, matica, and
learned societies, as well as men of literature, spoke, wrote, and pleaded
for unity in this period, in vain. But they and the universities of Prague
and Zagreb produced a younger generation which later took up the fight for
national unity and which abandoned individual political foibles and looked
over the boundaries of their provinces for inspiration.

Among the Slovenes, politics degenerated into the struggle for minor
concessions from the court at Vienna in regard to the Slovene language and
schools, while political parties multiplied freely through personal and
social differences. The lines which bound them to their kinsmen in the
south were weakest during this period.

The Croats found themselves no match for the astute Magyars who resorted to
packed diets, gerrymandering, bribery, and forgery. The Compromise (Nagoda)
of 1868 was as decisive as the murder of the farsighted Prince Michael
of Serbia in that year. It will be remembered that, in spite of his many
faults, he had made an agreement with Montenegro for the ultimate merging