Bajo los adoquines

We live in an age when the very foundations of society are threatened in almost all countries by a secret conspiracy of crime, when arson and murder are employed as political weapons by the miserable and half-witted instruments of organisations which arrogate to themselves high-sounding names, and persuade youthful enthusiasts that the end justifies the means, and that the most cowardly and bloodthirsty murders are heroic exploits, worthy to be sung with the deeds of Harmodius or Brutus. Poison, the dagger, the revolver, the bomb, all these are employed with impartial ferocity against those who by birth or election are fated to preside over the destinies of nations. Sometimes no doubt these foul acts represent a frenzied protest against a statecraft which subjects whole nations to the tyrannical rule of soldiers and police. But foul play is always foul, and there is no sign of discriminating justice in this form of criminal disease. Lincoln in 1865, Garfield and Czar Alexander III in 1881, President Carnot in 1894, King Humbert of Italy in 1900, President McKinley in 1901, King Carlos of Portugal in 1908, King George of Greece at Salonica in March 1913, and now the heir to the throne of the Habsburgs are but a small selection from a long list of atrocities in which only a morbid mind can trace the vindications of liberty.

It was on Sunday at Sarajevo after a visit to the Bosnian manoeuvres that the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian crown, and his wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg, were shot dead by an assassin. Well might the venerable Emperor Francis Joseph say, "I am spared nothing." This crime comes as a climax to the long series of terrible incidents which make up the tragic history of his house. The story is plain enough. Despite warnings of dangers the Archduke determined to attend the Bosnian military manoeuvres, and arrived in Sarajevo with his wife on Wednesday of last week. He spent two days in the mountains inspecting the troops; the Duchess meantime was fêted in the capital. On Sunday morning the Archducal pair drove through the crowded streets of Sarajevo to receive an address at the Town Hall. Before they reached it a bomb was thrown at their automobile. The Archduke warded it off with his arm; it rebounded on the road and exploded violently, injuring the four members of his suite in the second car, one of them severely, as well as some 20 persons in the crowd. The man who threw the bomb, a Servian printer named Cabrinovitch, was seized by the police, who with some difficulty saved him from the fury of the crowd. Half an hour was spent in the Town Hall, and the Royal party then drove away in the direction of the hospital to inquire after the injured aide-de-camp. On their way, at the junction of the Franz Joseph and Rudolf streets, a series of pistol shots were fired from behind a house. Two of them instantly took fatal effect; the Archduke was mortally wounded in the cheek, and the Archduchess, who had endeavoured to shield him, was shot in the body and sank unconscious in his arms. By the time the car reached the hospital both were dead.

The assassin, a Servian student or 19 years of age, Gavro Prinzip by name, denied having any accomplices, but a few yards from the scene of his crime a second unexploded bomb was found; and evidence is accumulating that a plot, deep laid, with many accomplices, had been formed to murder the Archduke. On being interrogated, Prinzip declared that as a Servian Nationalist he had long intended to kill some eminent person, while Cabrinovitch, a compositor, 21 years of age, said he had received the bomb from anarchists in Belgrade. Thus the cause of Nationalism in the Balkans has added another to the long list of horrid atrocities which have marked the struggle for Macedonia.

At first sight the political motive is hard to fathom, for the Archduke's sympathies with the Slavs, especially with the Catholic Croats, were so notorious that his accession to the throne was thought to herald a conflict with the Magyars; and such a conflict might easily have broken up the Dual Monarchy, whose present basis is found in a pact between Germans and Magyars supported by the Poles, and constantly threatened by agitation and discontent among the Czechs in the North, the Ruthenians, the Roumanians, the Southern Slavs, and the Italian Irredentists. But the idea which the Archduke Francis Ferdinand is supposed to have represented, drawn no doubt partly from the Jesuits and partly from military quarters, was the erection of a Catholic South Slav kingdom, taken mainly from Hungary, and including Croatia, Dalmatia, and Bosnia, which would have converted the dual into a "trial " monarchy. To such a solution the Servians, belonging by religion to the Greek Church, and using the Greek alphabet, are bitterly opposed. Their co-religionists are numerous in Southern Hungary, and form above one-third of the population of Bosnia. They speak the same language as the Bosnian Mussulman and Catholic Croat, and their aim is a greater Servia, which will stretch from the Adriatic littoral to the Mediterranean coast. All those fair lands of the Austrian Crown where various dialects of this language are spoken are destined, in their eyes, to form one kingdom, an orthodox Servia, ruled from Belgrade. It is this notion, no doubt, revolving in the mad brain of a criminal, which explains the tragedy of Sarajevo.

Though we would not forget that death, and especially a death like this, is a natural bar to anything like bitter criticism, it would be false and foolish to pretend that the political character of the late Archduke was one which commanded confidence or promised internal and external peace to the Habsburg monarchy. On the contrary, one of the main reasons for dreading the decease of the old Emperor was anxiety as to what might happen when the reins of power fell into the hands of his successor. It may be remembered that when the Italians were at war in Tripoli the late Archduke held menacing manoeuvres on the frontier, and was credited with the design, from which he was withheld by Count Aehrenthal and the Emperor, of marching into Italy to crush the secular monarchy and restore the Papal authority. We have already referred to the hatred and suspicion with which his clerical and Slav sympathies were regarded by Magyar statesmen. And it is to his deplorable influence that the naval and military expansion under which the financial solvency of the Dual Monarchy is rapidly disappearing must mainly be ascribed. He was no doubt in his private character brave and likeable; but those who knew him well were alarmed by an irrational obstinacy and self-will strangely streaked with weak and vacillating purposes. The sense of responsibility, drawn from long and painful experience, so marked in the venerable Emperor of Austria was absent in his heir, and it may well be that the new succession is more likely to hold together the composite and discordant elements of the Hapsburg realm.