The Obrenovitch dynasty was thus at an end.  Its rival, the Karageorgevitch dynasty, returned to power—­naturally under a black cloud of European disgust and suspicion.  King Peter is not, however, as black as he has sometimes been painted.  He fought gallantly in 1870 as a French officer; as a young man he translated Stuart Mill’s Essay on Liberty into Serb, and for a generation he lived by preference in democratic Geneva and in Paris.  Under him Serbia has for the first time enjoyed real constitutional government.  Quietly, as occasion arose, the regicides were removed to the background, the old methods of favouritism were steadily discouraged, and it is not too much to say that an entirely new atmosphere has been created in Belgrade since 1903.  Among the younger politicians in Serbia, as in other Slavonic countries, the moral influence of Professor Masaryk, the great Czech philosopher and politician, has grown more and more marked.

The depth of Serb aspirations in Bosnia has two obvious grounds—­on the one hand, pure national sentiment of the best kind; on the other, the urgent economic need for a seaboard, Serbia being the only inland country in Europe save Switzerland, and not enjoying the latter’s favoured position in the immediate vicinity of great world-markets.  Austria-Hungary, on her part, set herself deliberately not merely to block this access to the sea, but also to keep Serbia in complete economic dependence.  Under the new dynasty the little kingdom showed a keener desire to shake off its vassalage and find new markets.  The so-called “Pig War”—­the breeding of swine is Serbia’s staple industry, and the founders of her two rival dynasties were wealthy pig-breeders—­proved an unexpected success, for new trade outlets were found in Egypt and elsewhere.  But the initial strain hit every peasant in his pocket and thus greatly accentuated the feeling against Austria-Hungary.  At this stage came the Young Turk revolution and its sequel, the annexation of Bosnia.  To any impartial observer it had been obvious from the first that those who dreamt of Austria-Hungary’s voluntary withdrawal from the two provinces were living in a fool’s paradise.  The formal act of annexation merely set a seal to thirty years of effective Austrian administration, during which the Sultan’s rule had been confined to the official celebration of his birthday.  Educational and agrarian problems had been neglected, popular discontent had smouldered, but at least great material progress had been made.  Roads, railways, public buildings had been created out of nothing, capital had been sunk, a new machine of government had been constructed.  Austria had come to stay, and Aehrenthal, in annexing the provinces, felt himself to be merely setting the seal to a document which had been signed a generation earlier.  He had failed to reckon with the outcry which this technical breach of international law evoked:  like Bethmann-Hollweg, he had no blind