The circumstances of the murder are still shrouded in mystery.  It is known that no proper measures were taken for the protection of the Archduke and his wife in Bosnia, though it is still impossible to assign the responsibility for such criminal negligence.  It is notorious that in a country like Bosnia, which has for years been infested with police spies and informers, and where every movement of every stranger is strictly under control, so elaborate and ramified a plot could hardly hope to escape the notice of the authorities.  It has even been asserted that Princip and Cabrinovic, the two assassins, were agents provocateurs in the pay of the police, and though no proof is as yet forthcoming, there is nothing inherently improbable in the idea.[1] Certain it is that the gravest suspicion rests upon those who connived at the disgraceful anti-Serb riots of which Sarajevo was the scene for nearly forty-eight hours after the murder.

[Footnote 1:  The fact that they have only been sentenced to terms of imprisonment, while some of their accomplices have been condemned to death, has a much simpler explanation.  Both men are under the age of twenty, and therefore by Austrian law immune from the death penalty.]

The murder provided an admirable pretext for aggression against Serbia, and at the same time tended to revive all the latent prejudice with which the country of the regicides was still regarded in the West.  Yet those who seek to establish a connection between the crime of Sarajevo and the Serbian Government are on an utterly false scent.  I have tried to describe the atmosphere of universal and growing discontent which produced the explosion.  Those who know the Slavonic South are well aware that Bosnia, Dalmatia, and Croatia are a seething pot which needs no stirring from the outside, and that the assassins are but the natural successors of the wild young students who during the last five years fired upon the Governors of Croatia and Bosnia.[1] But quite apart from this, the complicity of official Belgrade is rendered incredible by urgent considerations of internal Serbian politics.  After a long and delicate negotiation the Concordat with the Vatican had just been concluded:  the Orient railway question had reached the critical stage:  above all, a customs and military union between Serbia and Montenegro was on the point of being concluded.  But, of course, quite apart from such considerations, Serbia was suffering from the extreme exhaustion consequent upon waging two wars within a year, and her statesmen, despite the rebuffs administered by Count Berchtold, were genuinely anxious for a modus vivendi with the neighbouring Monarchy, as an essential condition to a period of quiet internal consolidation.  But this was the very thing which the controllers of Austrian foreign policy—­the phantom Minister Berchtold, the sinister clique in the Foreign Office, and the Magyar oligarchy, led by that masterful reactionary,