ustria-Hungary to Servia had
been acutely strained since October, 1908, when the former annexed
the Turkish provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which under the
terms of the treaty of Berlin she had been administering since 1878.
The inhabitants of Bosnia and Herzegovina are Serb, and Serb also
are the inhabitants of Dalmatia on the west and Croatia on the
north, which the Dual Monarchy had already brought under its
sceptre. The new annexation therefore seemed a fatal and a final
blow to the national aspirations of the Serb race and it was
bitterly resented by those who had already been gathered together
and "redeemed" in the Kingdom of Servia. A second disastrous
consequence of the annexation was that it left Servia hopelessly
land-locked. The Serb population of Dalmatia and Herzegovina looked
out on the Adriatic along a considerable section of its eastern
coast, but Servia's long-cherished hope of becoming a maritime state
by the annexation of the Serb provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina
was now definitively at an end. She protested, she appealed, she
threatened; but with Germany behind the Dual Monarchy and Russia
still weak from the effects of the war with Japan, she was quickly
compelled to submit to superior force.

During the war of the Balkan Allies against Turkey Servia made one
more effort to get to the Adriatic,--this time by way of Albania.
She marched her forces over the mountains of that almost impassable
country and reached the sea at Durazzo. But she was forced back by
the European powers at the demand of Austria-Hungary, as some weeks
later on the same compulsion she had to withdraw from the siege of
Scutari. Then she turned toward the Aegean, and the second Balkan
War gave her a new opportunity. The treaty of Bukarest and the
convention with Greece assured her of an outlet to the sea at
Saloniki. But this settlement proved scarcely less objectionable to
Austria-Hungary than the earlier dream of Servian expansion to the
Adriatic by the annexation of the Turkish provinces of Bosnia and
Herzegovina.

The fact is that, if we look at the matter dispassionately and in a
purely objective spirit, we shall find that there really was a
hopeless incompatibility between the ideals, aims, policies, and
interests of the Servians and the Serb race and those of the
Austrians and Hungarians. Any aggrandizement of the Kingdom of
Servia, any enlargement of its territory, any extension to the sea
and especially to the