of our own Marlborough, whose
song, "Prinz Eugen, der edle Ritter" (Prince Eugene, the noble Knight),
has been sung in July and August 1914 on the streets of Vienna, just as
"Marlbrook s'en va-t-en guerre" might be sung by our Belgian allies. The
peace of 1718 represents Habsburg's farthest advance southwards; Belgrade
and half of present-day Serbia owned allegiance to Vienna. Then came the
check of 1739, when these conquests were restored to the Sultan. Due merely
to incompetent generals, it need not have been permanent, had not Frederick
the Great created a diversion from the north. By the time that the War of
Austrian Succession and the Seven Years' War were over, that expansion
southwards which had seemed so certain was irrevocably postponed. The
organisation of fresh "Military Frontiers," the colonisation of waste lands
in South Hungary--all was admirable so far as it went, but was already a
defensive rather than an offensive measure. Meanwhile a formidable rival
appeared in the shape of the Russian colossus, and the history of two
centuries is dominated by Austro-Russian rivalry in the Balkans. Here
we are confronted by the first of those lost opportunities in which the
history of modern Austria is unhappily so rich.

During the eighteenth century Austria became, as it were, the chief home
of bureaucratic government, first under Maria Theresa, one of the greatest
women-sovereigns, then under her son Joseph II. A series of "enlightened
experiments" in government, typical of the age of Voltaire and of
Frederick, and honestly conducted _for_ the people, though never _by_ the
people, ended as such experiments are apt to end, in failure. The most that
can be said is that the bureaucratic machine had become more firmly fixed
in the groove which it was henceforth to occupy.

The failure of Joseph II. was above all due to his inability to recognise
the meaning of Nationality, to his attempt to apply Germanisation as the
one infallible remedy for all internal difficulties in his dominions. The
idea of Nationality, already gaining strength, obtained a fresh impetus
from the French Revolution. While in the west it sowed the seeds of United
Italy and United Germany, which the nineteenth century was to bring to
fruition, in the Balkans it stirred waters which had seemed dead for
centuries, and led to the uprising of the Serbs and Greeks, then of the
Roumanians, and finally a generation later of the Bulgarians. In the
Habsburg