The scandals of the Friedjung Trial led to the fall of the Governor of Croatia, but there was no change of system.  After a temporary truce the old conflict revived, and within eighteen months the friction between Magyars and Croats was as acute as ever.  The Magyar Government employed every possible device of administrative pressure in order to create dissensions between the Croat and Serb parties—­repeated elections, wholesale corruption and violence, persecution of the Press and of the political leaders.  Yet so far from languishing under such a system, the movement for unity gained fresh strength and extended to the kindred Slovenes, striking root even among the extreme Clericals, who had hitherto regarded the Orthodox Serbs with distrust and suspicion.

In the spring of 1912 the conflict culminated in the abolition of the Croatian constitution by the arbitrary decree of the Hungarian Premier, in the appointment of a reactionary official as dictator, and a few months later in the suspension of the charter of the Serb Orthodox Church.

Sec.7. The Balkan Wars.—­Never in history had a more inopportune moment been chosen for such crying illegalities.  For close upon the heels of the demonstrations and unrest which they evoked, came the dramatic events of the Balkan War, the crushing victories of the allies, the resurrection of the lost Serb Empire, the long-deferred revenge for the defeat of Kosovo.  The whole Southern Slav provinces of Austria-Hungary were carried off their feet by a wave of enthusiasm for the allies, and an impossibly strained situation was reached when the Government of Vienna placed itself in violent conflict with Serbia, vetoed her expansion to the sea, insisted upon creating a phantom Albanian State, egged on Bulgaria against her allies, and finally mobilised in order to impose its will upon the Serbs.  Every peasant in the Slavonic South naturally contrasted Magyar misrule in Croatia with the splendid achievements of his Serb kinsmen across the frontier.  I know of poor villagers in the mountainous hinterland of Dalmatia who, having no money to give to the cause of the Balkan Red Cross, offered casks of country wine or even such clothes and shoes as they could spare from their scanty belongings.  The total subscriptions raised among the Southern Slavs of the Monarchy in aid of the allies far exceeded any sums previously raised for charitable purposes among so poor a population.  “In the Balkan sun,” said a prominent Croat Clerical, “we see the dawn of our day.”

The national rejoicings which “the avenging of Kosovo” evoked among the Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes of Austria-Hungary were accompanied by lively protests against the bare idea of an Austro-Serbian war, which, so far as the Southern Slavs on both sides of the frontier were concerned, would have been a civil war in the most literal sense of the word (and this civil war, it must be remembered, is now actually being waged).  The politicians, however, though