well-nigh unanimous in their enthusiasm for the cause of the Balkan allies, could not at one breath throw off the habits of a lifetime.  Petty jealousies still divided them and were skilfully played upon by the Magyar Government.  The strain of five years of opposition and persecution had produced its effect upon the Coalition leaders and rendered them all too prone to further concessions.  But the younger generation had been profoundly affected by the Croatian dictatorship and the Balkan wars; at an age when our youth think of nothing but cricket and football, the students and even the schoolboys of Croatia, Dalmatia, and Bosnia became engrossed in political speculation, brooded over the wrongs of their disunited race, and dreamt of Serbia as the new Piedmont of the Balkans.  To all alike even the most advanced politician seemed no better than an old fogey, and it is no exaggeration to assert that the existing parties had lost all hold upon the overwhelming majority of those who in ten years’ time will represent the manhood and the intellect of the race.  The widespread nature of the movement may be illustrated by the school strike of the spring of 1912, during which every boy and girl above the age of fourteen in most of the primary and secondary schools of Croatia, Dalmatia, and Bosnia played truant as a protest against the misgovernment of Croatia.  On that occasion a crowd of 5000 school children paraded the streets of Agram shouting “Down with Cuvaj” (the Ban or Governor of Croatia), and cheering the police when they tried to intervene!

As in all such movements, the views of individuals varied in intensity:  some merely gave a theoretical adherence to the ideals of Mazzini or of Mill, others swallowed the Nihilist doctrine of Bakunin and dreamt of revolution, ushered in by terrorist propaganda.  Out of this milieu came the two young assassins who murdered the Archduke Francis Ferdinand.

Sec.8. The Murder of the Archduke.—­By a hideous irony of fate Francis Ferdinand was the one man capable of restoring order to an already desperate internal situation.  His very person was a programme and a watchword, and it had long been an open secret that his accession would be the signal for drastic reforms.  It was his ambition to supersede the effete Dual system by a blend of centralism and federalism such as would reconcile the national sentiment of individual races with the consciousness of a common citizenship and would at the same time restore to foreign policy the possibility of initiative.  This programme involved the emancipation of the non-Magyar races of Hungary from the intolerable racial tyranny of the Magyars, and at the same time a serious attempt to solve the Southern Slav question by unifying the race under Habsburg rule.  As his Imperial uncle grew older and feebler, Francis Ferdinand is known to have elaborated his designs, and a regular staff of able lieutenants had grouped themselves round him.  But on the very eve of action the strong man was removed, to the scarcely veiled relief of all those elements in the State whose political and racial monopoly was threatened by such far-reaching and beneficial changes.