The year 1914 found England involved in serious difficulties.  Her parliament had voted to give home rule to Ireland.  There was to be an Irish parliament, which would govern Ireland as the Irish wanted it governed.  Ulster, a province in the northeast of Ireland, however, was very unhappy over this arrangement.  Its people were largely of English and Scotch descent, and they were Protestants, while the other inhabitants of Ireland were Celts and Catholics.  The people of this province were so bitter against home rule that they actually imported rifles and drilled regiments, saying that they would start a civil war if England compelled them to be governed by an Irish parliament.

There were labor troubles and strikes, also, in England, and threatened revolutions in India, where the English government was none too popular.  Altogether, the German war lords felt sure that England had so many troubles of her own that she would never dare to enter a general European war.

Meanwhile, the Serbians, unhappy over the loss of Bosnia and Herzegovina to Austria, were busily stirring up the people of these provinces to revolt.  The military leaders who really ruled Austria, were in favor of crushing these attempted uprisings with an iron hand.

One of the leaders of this party, a man who was greatly hated by the Bosnians, was the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, nephew of the emperor and heir to the throne.  He finally announced that he was going in person to Sarajevo (sae rae ye’vo) in Bosnia to look into the situation himself.  The people of the city warned him not to come, saying that his life would be in danger, as he was so hated.  Being a headstrong man of violent temper, he refused to listen to this advice, but insisted on going.  His devoted wife, after doing her best to dissuade him, finally refused to let him go without her.

When it was known that he was really coming, the Bosnian revolutionists laid their plans.  They found out just where his carriage was to pass, and at almost every street corner, they had some assassin with bomb or pistol.  One bomb was thrown at him, but it exploded too soon, and he escaped.  Bursting with indignation, he was threatening the mayor for his lax policing, when a second assassin, a nineteen year old boy, stepped up with a pistol and shot to death the archduke and his wife.

Many people have referred to this incident as the cause of the great European war.  As you have been shown, however, this was simply the spark that exploded the magazine.  With the whole situation as highly charged as it was, any other little spark would have been enough to set the war a-going.

The Austrian government sent word to Serbia that the crime had been traced to Serbian plotters, some of them in the employ of the government.  It demanded that Serbia apologize; also that she hunt out and punish the plotters at once.  And because Austria did not trust the Serbians to hold an honest investigation, she demanded that her officers should sit in the Serbian courts as judges.