AUSTRIA GIVES HOSTAGES TO HISTORY

The Zagreb trial was conducted by a man who gave a good impersonation
of Mr. Justice Shallow. "There is nothing to laugh at!" he cried, when
a Serb doctor was asked whether he did not refuse to wear cravats
because of the resemblance of that word to Croat. The whole farce
resulted, not as one might have expected, in the collapse of the
prosecution but in thirty-one convictions, varying in length from five
to twelve years. The Croats, however, had thwarted Austria's schemes.
They remained true to the Serbs, acted as their counsel without
payment and helped to support the families of the poorer prisoners. At
the Friedjung trial this professor, an eminent historian, produced a
series of photographs of documents which were subsequently shown to
have been fabricated at the Austro-Hungarian legation in Belgrade; he
wished to prove that a political club in that town was guilty of a
most extensive plot involving the Yugoslav territories of the House of
Habsburg. Among those whom these proceedings and those at Zagreb
brought into European prominence were the Pribi[vc]evi['c] brothers, a
very zealous family of Croatian Serbs, that is to say Croats belonging
to the Orthodox Church. [The chief of these four brothers was
Svetozar, a statesman whose Serbo-Croat Coalition party was, with the
advent of Yugoslavia in 1918, to form the nucleus of the Democratic
party. He then became for many months the all-powerful Minister of
the Interior, a man with the appearance of a bull-dog in whose veins
is electricity. The vehemence of his methods of centralization is
supported and opposed by his countrymen with an almost equal
vehemence.] ... But to return to the events of 1908 and 1909--the
result of these two trials was lamentable from the Austrian point of
view. More success attended her efforts in Cetinje, for Nikita was
intensely roused against his son-in-law, and the European reputation
of Serbia was again dragged down to the level of the day which saw the
murder of Alexander and his Queen. An individual called Nasti['c]
whom, according to Professor Friedjung, one could only touch with a
pair of tongs, accused the Serbian Royal Family of attempting to blow
up their picturesque relative, under whose roof, by the way, Princess
Helen of Serbia, his grand-daughter, happened to be staying. The bombs
were carried in an ordinary portmanteau to Kotor, where they were
discovered. Those who believed that Nikita