Page:The guilt of William Hohenzollern.djvu/93

Rh defection of Rumania, by making use of the present comparatively favourable opportunity for a passage-of-arms with Serbia. The military authorities in Austria, as is well known, have for a long time been insisting on the need of strengthening the reputation of the Monarchy by a war. Once it was to be against Italy, in order to drive out her irredentism; another time it was to be against Serbia, who by warlike achievements à la Prince Eugene was to be forced to renounce her evil ways and be taught better manners. I can quite understand, as I have said, this standpoint of those in control of the Austrian State, and in their position would perhaps have used the Serbian disturbances even earlier than they did to give the South Slav question a Habsburg solution.

"The first thing to be presumed for such a policy, however, would be a clear programme, which rests on the recognition that the present state of things with regard to public and international justice within the Serbo-Croatian family of nations which assigns one part of this nation, split up only by religion and not by race, to the Austrian State, another part to the Hungarian State, a third to the Joint Monarchy, and finally a fourth and a fifth to independent kingdoms is permanently untenable. For the endeavour to maintain the sacred status quo under all circumstances for reasons of convenience has often enough, and just lately at the recent Balkan crisis, led to a complete collapse of the political house of cards built on these foundations.

"In the first place, I now doubt whether there has been drawn up in Vienna a plan on a great scale which alone would afford the basis of a permanent