al races with the consciousness of a
common citizenship and would at the same time restore to foreign policy the
possibility of initiative. This programme involved the emancipation of the
non-Magyar races of Hungary from the intolerable racial tyranny of the
Magyars, and at the same time a serious attempt to solve the Southern Slav
question by unifying the race under Habsburg rule. As his Imperial uncle
grew older and feebler, Francis Ferdinand is known to have elaborated his
designs, and a regular staff of able lieutenants had grouped themselves
round him. But on the very eve of action the strong man was removed, to the
scarcely veiled relief of all those elements in the State whose political
and racial monopoly was threatened by such far-reaching and beneficial
changes.

The circumstances of the murder are still shrouded in mystery. It is known
that no proper measures were taken for the protection of the Archduke
and his wife in Bosnia, though it is still impossible to assign the
responsibility for such criminal negligence. It is notorious that in a
country like Bosnia, which has for years been infested with police spies
and informers, and where every movement of every stranger is strictly under
control, so elaborate and ramified a plot could hardly hope to escape the
notice of the authorities. It has even been asserted that Princip and
Cabrinovic, the two assassins, were _agents provocateurs_ in the pay of
the police, and though no proof is as yet forthcoming, there is nothing
inherently improbable in the idea.[1] Certain it is that the gravest
suspicion rests upon those who connived at the disgraceful anti-Serb riots
of which Sarajevo was the scene for nearly forty-eight hours after the
murder.

[Footnote 1: The fact that they have only been sentenced to terms of
imprisonment, while some of their accomplices have been condemned to death,
has a much simpler explanation. Both men are under the age of twenty, and
therefore by Austrian law immune from the death penalty.]

The murder provided an admirable pretext for aggression against Serbia, and
at the same time tended to revive all the latent prejudice with which the
country of the regicides was still regarded in the West. Yet those who seek
to establish a connection between the crime of Sarajevo and the Serbian
Government are on an utterly false scent. I have tried to describe
the atmosphere of universal and growing discontent which produced the
explosion. Those wh