BERT SOREL (1902).

In April 1909, a week after the international crisis evoked by Austria's
annexation of Bosnia had come to an end, I paid my first visit to Cetinje,
the tiny mountain-capital of Montenegro, and was assured by the Premier,
Dr. Tomanovi, that the conflict had merely been postponed, not averted--a
fact which even then was obvious enough. "But remember," he said, "it is
a question of _Aut aut_ (either, or)--either Serbia and Montenegro or
Austria-Hungary. One or other has got to go, and you may rest assured that
in four, or at most five, years from now there will be a European war over
this very question." At the time I merely regarded his prophecy as a proof
of Serb megalomania, but it has been literally fulfilled.

In 1908-1909 Austria-Hungary, with the aid of her German ally, enforced
her wishes in respect of Bosnia upon a reluctant Europe; but instead of
following up this success by a determined effort to solve the Southern Slav
question on an Austrian basis, she allowed the confusion to grow yearly
worse confounded, and gradually created an intolerable situation from
which a peaceful exit was well-nigh impossible. The actual event which
precipitated the struggle, the event from which the diplomatic contest of
last July, and thus the great war, first proceeded, was the assassination
of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife at Sarajevo on June 28 and
the consequent acute friction between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. But the
murder, as will be shown later, was merely made the pretext for Austria's
declaration of war. The real causes lie far deeper, and can only be
properly understood on the basis of an historical survey.

My apology for inflicting so many unfamiliar details upon the reader is
that the key to the whole situation lies in Austria-Hungary, and that upon
the fate of its provinces and races in this war depends to a very great
extent the question whether the new Europe which is to issue from this
fiery ordeal is to be better than the old Europe which is crumbling in
ruins before our eyes. For the moment a thick fog of war obscures this
point of view; but the time will assuredly come when it will emerge in its
true perspective.

In recent years it had become a cheap journalistic commonplace to refer to
the coming "inevitable" struggle between Teuton and Slav, and the present
war is no doubt widely regarded as proving the correctness of this theory,
despite the fact that the two chief g