’The political ideals both of Cadets and Octobrists were learnt chiefly from England, the study of whose constitutional history had aroused in Russia an enthusiasm hardly intelligible to a present-day Englishman.  All three Dumas ... were remarkably friendly to England, and England supplied the staple of the precedents and parallels for quotation.’[24]

In a word, the beginnings of Russian constitutionalism not only coincided in time with the Anglo-Russian agreement of 1907, but owed much to the inspiration of England.

Notes: 

[Footnote 22:  Count Aehrenthal, foreign minister of Austria (1906-1912), started the scheme of the Novi Bazar railway to connect the railways of Bosnia with the (then) Turkish line to Salonica.  See also Correspondence, No. 19, Sir R. Rodd to Sir E. Grey, July 25:  ’There is reliable information that Austria intends to seize the Salonica railway.’]

[Footnote 23:  For a summary of so-called proofs, see Appendix IV, infra.]

[Footnote 24:  Camb.  Mod.  Hist. xii. 379.]

CHAPTER IV

CHRONOLOGICAL SKETCH OF THE CRISIS

The following sketch of events from June 28 to August 4, 1914, is merely intended as an introduction to the analytical and far more detailed account of the negotiations and declarations of those days which the reader will find below (Chap.  V).  Here we confine the narrative to a plain statement of the successive stages in the crisis, neither discussing the motives of the several Powers involved, nor distinguishing the fine shades of difference in the various proposals which were made by would-be mediators.

The crisis of 1914 began with an unforeseen development in the old quarrel of Austria-Hungary and Russia over the Servian question.  On June 28 the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir-apparent of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and his wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg, paid a visit of ceremony to the town of Serajevo, in Bosnia, the administrative centre of the Austrian provinces of Bosnia and the Herzegovina.  In entering the town, the Archduke and the Duchess narrowly escaped being killed by a bomb which was thrown at their carriage.  Later in the day they were shot by assassins armed with Browning pistols.  The crime was apparently planned by political conspirators who resented the Austrian annexation of Bosnia and the Herzegovina (supra, p. 54), and who desired that these provinces should be united to Servia.

The Austrian Government, having instituted an inquiry, came to the conclusion that the bombs of the conspirators had been obtained from a Servian arsenal; that the crime had been planned in Belgrade, the Servian capital, with the help of a Servian staff-officer who provided the pistols; that the criminals and their weapons had been conveyed from Servia into Bosnia by officers of Servian frontier-posts and by Servian customs-officials.