felt that every effort
must be made to restore that discord between Croat and Serb which had been
for a generation one of the main pillars of their racial hegemony. These
designs happened to coincide with the aims of the Foreign Office in Vienna
in connection with the annexation of Bosnia, and Budapest and Vienna
combined in a systematic campaign of persecution against the Serbs of
Croatia. "Wholesale arrests and charges of treason led up to the monster
trial at Agram, which dragged on for seven months amid scandals worthy of
the days of Judge Jeffreys. The Diet ceased to meet, the constitution of
Croatia was in abeyance, the elections were characterised by corruption and
violence such as eclipsed even the infamous Hungarian elections of 1910;
the Press and the political leaders were singled out for special acts of
persecution and intimidation." These tactics were revealed to the outside
world in the notorious Friedjung Trial (December 1909), resulting out of
a libel action brought by the Serbo-Croat Coalition leaders against Dr.
Friedjung, the distinguished Austrian historian. The documents, on the
basis of which he had publicly accused them of being paid agents of the
Serbian Government, had been supplied to him by the Austro-Hungarian
Foreign Office, and the trial revealed them as impudent forgeries,
concocted in the Austro-Hungarian Legation in Belgrade! The moral
responsibility for these forgeries was subsequently brought home to Count
Forgach, the Minister in Belgrade, and indirectly, of course, to Count
Aehrenthal himself as Foreign Minister. But Forgach, though publicly
denounced as "Count Azev,"[1] was not allowed to fall into disgrace; on
the contrary, he had become within two years of his exposure permanent
Under-Secretary at the Ballplatz, and inspirer of new plots to discredit
and ruin Serbia.

[Footnote 1: An allusion to the notorious Russian _agent provocateur _who
was at one and the same time a member of the secret police and of the
revolutionary organisation.]

The scandals of the Friedjung Trial led to the fall of the Governor of
Croatia, but there was no change of system. After a temporary truce the old
conflict revived, and within eighteen months the friction between Magyars
and Croats was as acute as ever. The Magyar Government employed every
possible device of administrative pressure in order to create dissensions
between the Croat and Serb parties--repeated elections, wholesale
corruption and vio