points. Germany, advancing from a victorious position acquired over the Bosnian business, affirmed (in the year 1911) her right to be consulted over the Moroccan settlement. Nor were the French permitted to occupy Morocco until they had ceded to Germany a portion of their African colony of the Congo. This transaction was confused by many side issues. German patriots did not regard it as a sufficient success, though French patriots certainly regarded it as a grave humiliation. But perhaps the chief consequence of the whole affair was the recrudescence in the French people as a whole of a temper, half forgotten, which provoked them to withstand the now greatly increased power of the German Empire and of its ally, and to determine that if such challenges were to continue unchecked during the coming years, the national position of France would be forfeited.

Following upon this crisis came, in the next year—still a consequence of the Turkish Revolution—the sudden determination of the Balkan States, including Greece, to attack Turkey. It was the King of Montenegro (a small Slav State which had always maintained its independence) who fired the first shot upon the 8th of October, 1912, with his own hand. In the course of that autumn the Balkan Allies were universally successful, failed only in taking Constantinople itself, reduced Turkey in Europe to an insignificant strip of territory near the capital itself, and proceeded to settle the conquered territory according to an agreement made by them before the outbreak of hostilities.

But here the Germanic Powers again intervened. The defeated Turkish Army had been trained by German officers upon a German system; the expansion of German and Austrian political military influence throughout the Near East was a cardinal part of the German creed and policy. Through Austria the Balkans were to be dominated at last, and Austria, at this critical moment, vetoed the rational settlement which the allied Balkan States had agreed to among themselves. She would not allow the Servians to annex those territories inhabited by men of their race, and to reach their natural outlet to the sea upon the shores of the Adriatic. She proposed the creation of a novel State of Albania under a German prince, to block Servia's way to the sea. She further proposed to Servia compensation by way of Servia's annexing the territory round Monastir, which had a Bulgarian population, and to Bulgaria the insufficient compensation of taking over, farther to the east, territory that was not Bulgarian at all, but mixed Greek and Turkish.

The whole thing was characteristically German in type, ignoring and despising national feeling and national right, creating artificial boundaries, and flagrantly sinning against the European sense of patriotism. A furious conflict between the various members of the former Balkan Alliance followed; but the settlement which Austria had virtually imposed remained firm, and the third of the great Germanic steps affirming the growing Germanic scheme in Europe had been taken.

But it had been taken at the expense of further and very gravely shaking the already unstable armed equilibrium of Europe.

The German Empire foresaw the coming strain; a law was passed immediately increasing the numbers of men to be trained to arms within its boundaries, and ultimately increasing that number so largely as to give to Germany alone a very heavy preponderance—a preponderance of something like thirty per cent.—over the corresponding number trained in France.

To this move France could not reply by increasing her armed forces, because she already took every available man. She did the only possible thing under the circumstances. She increased by fifty per cent. the term during which her young men must serve in the army, changing that term from two years to three.

The heavy burden thus suddenly imposed upon the French led to very considerable political disputes in that country, especially as the parliamentary form of government there established is exceedingly unpopular, and the politicians who live by it generally despised. When, therefore, the elections of last year were at hand, it seemed as though this French increase of military power would be in jeopardy. Luckily it was maintained, in spite of the opposition of fairly honest but uncritical men like Jaurés, and of far less reputable professional politicians.

Whether this novel strain upon the French people could have been long continued we shall never know, for, in the heat of the debates provoked by this measure and its maintenance, came the last events which determined the great catastrophe.

(6) The Immediate Occasion of the War.

We have seen how constantly and successfully Austria had supported the general Prussian thesis in Europe, and, in particular, the predominance of the German Powers over the Slav.

We have seen how, in pursuit of this policy, the sharpest friction was always suffered at the danger-point of Servia. Servia was the Slav State millions of whose native population were governed against their will by Austro-Hungarian officials. Servia was the Slav State mortally wounded by the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. And Servia was the Slav State which Austria had in particular mortified by forbidding her access to the Adriatic, and by imposing upon her an unnatural boundary, even after her great victories of the Balkan War.

The heir to the Hapsburgs—the man who, seeing the great age of his uncle, might at any moment ascend the throne—was the Archduke Francis. He had for years pursued one consistent policy for the aggrandizement of his House, which policy was the pitting of the Catholic Slavs against the Orthodox Slavs, thereby rendering himself in person particularly odious to the Orthodox Serbs, so many of whose compatriots and co-religionists were autocratically governed against their will in the newly annexed provinces.

To the capital of these provinces, Sarajevo, he proceeded in state in the latter part of last June, and there, through the emissaries of certain secret societies (themselves Austrian subjects, but certainly connected with the population of independent Servia, and, as some claimed, not unconnected with the Servian Government itself), he was assassinated upon Saturday, the 28th of June, 1914.

For exactly a month, the consequences of this event—the provocation which it implied to Austria, the opportunity which it gave the Hapsburgs for a new and more formidable expression of Germanic power against the Slavs—were kept wholly underground. That is the most remarkable of all the preliminaries to the war. There was a month of silence after so enormous a moment. Why? In order to give Germany and Austria a start in the conflict already long designed. Military measures were being taken secretly, stores of ammunition overhauled, and all done that should be necessary for a war which was premeditated in Berlin, half-feared, half-desired in Vienna, and dated for the end of July—after the harvest.

The Government of Berlin was, during the whole of this period, actively engaged in forcing Austria forward in a path to which she was not unwilling; and, at last, upon the 23rd of July, Europe was amazed to read a note sent by the Imperial Governor at Vienna to the Royal Government in the Servian capital of Belgrade, which note was of a kind altogether unknown hitherto in the relations between Christian States. This note demanded not only the suppression of patriotic, and therefore anti-Austrian, societies in Servia (the assassins of the