ltimate merging of their states and, after allying himself with
Rumania, had carried out an agreement with the Bulgarian committee for
the amalgamation of Bulgaria with Serbia, thus obtaining a commanding
influence in the Balkans. With his death, Serbia fell into the hands of
Milan and Alexander, whose weak and erratically despotic reigns ushered
in an era in Serbian history from which she emerged in 1903, through
the assassination and the extinction of the last of the Obrenovics, a
country without a good name, a nation which, through no special fault of
its own, had become degraded.

It was in the midst of this political decay that the Bosnians revolted
in 1875 and that Serbia, Montenegro, Russia, and Rumania became involved
in the Russo-Turkish war. Space forbids but the most hasty survey of the
occupation and administration by Austria of Bosnia and the Herzegovina
by virtue of the Treaty of Berlin in 1878.

Bismarck, Francis Joseph, and Andrassy were swayed by differing motives
whose total result was that Austria was to become a Balkan power--the
outpost of the German _Drang nach Osten_--and that it was worth while
making a greater Serbia impossible, even at the cost of increasing the
number of Slavs in the Habsburg monarchy, which, now reenforced by
the Ausgleich, could stand the strain of advancing democracy and the
necessity, therefore, of granting further rights to the Slavs.

The occupation of Bosnia led to the first real quarrels in modern times
between Croat and Serb, for the former wanted Bosnia in Greater Croatia
in order to have connection with Dalmatia; the latter wished it annexed
to Greater Serbia, because it was Serbian. Magyar and German, further,
quarreled as to the status of Bosnia and left it unsettled. But one
thing was settled by the occupation in 1879 and the annexation in
1908. Neither Greater Croatia nor Greater Serbia were any longer truly
possible as a final solution, only a Jugo-Slavia. The Greater Croatia
received a mortal blow by the addition of Serbs up to more than one
third of the number of Croats in Austria-Hungary, and Serbia faced the
future either as a vassal or as a territory which must be annexed. From
that time until the present the Habsburg monarchy, largely owing to
the predominance of the Magyars in Croatia, adopted a policy of
prevention--Jugo-Slav nationality was to be prevented. Viewed in that
light the rule of Count Khuen-Hederv[a]ry, Ban of Croatia from 1883
to 1903, in