An era big with decisive events arrived. The Jugo-Slavs had learned that union meant victory, division foreign mastery. Petty politics and religious fanaticism were forgotten, and Jugo-Slav nationality was formed in the fierce fires of Austro-Magyar terrorism and forgery and in the whirlwind reaped from the Balkan wars.
It was too late to talk of trialism unless it meant independence, and, when it meant that, it did not mean Austrian trialism. The treason trial by which Baron Rauch hoped to split the Serbo-Croat coalition, and which was to furnish the cause of a war with Serbia on the annexation of Bosnia in 1908, collapsed. It rested on forgeries concocted within the walls of the Austro-Hungarian legation in Belgrade where Count Forgách held forth. The annexation of Bosnia in 1908 completed the operation begun in 1878 and called for the completion of the policy of prevention. It was the forerunner of the press campaign in the first Balkan war, the Prohaska affair, the attack by Bulgaria upon Serbia and Greece, the rebuff to Masaryk and Pai[c], the murder of Francis Ferdinand, and the Austro-Hungarian note to Serbia. The mysteries connected with the forgeries and this chain of events will remain a fertile field for detectives and psychologists and, after that, for historians. For us, it is necessary to note that, as the hand of Pan-Germanism became more evident, the Slovenes began to draw nearer to the Croats and the Serbs. It remained only for the Serbs to electrify the Jugo-Slavs—"to avenge Kossovo with Kumanovo"—in order to cement their loyalty to the regenerated Serbs. Religious differences, political rivalries, linguistic quibbles, and the petty foibles of centuries appeared to be forgotten in the three short years which elapsed from Kumanovo to the destruction of Serbia in 1915. The Greater Serbia idea had really perished in 1915, as had the Greater Croatia idea in 1878. In their place emerged Jugo-Slavia—the kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes—implied by the South Slav Parliamentary Club in Austria in their Declaration of May 30, 1917, and formulated by the Pact of Corfu of July 7, 1917, which Pasié, premier of Serbia, and Trumbié, the head of the London Jugo-Slav Committee, drew up. The evolution had been completed. Nationalism had proved stronger than geography, stronger than opposing religions, more cohesive than political and economic interests. For this, the Jugo-Slavs have not only themselves and modern progress, like railroad-building, to thank, but also the policy of the Habsburg monarchy, the hopeful, though feeble, Note of the Allies to President Wilson, the Russian Revolution, and the entry of the United States into the war.
For the historian, it remains to examine the depth and the character of the movement. He should neither lament that it succeeded, nor frown upon it that it did not come long ago when his own nation achieved its unity. That it is a reality is proved by the fact that the Central Powers believed its destruction worth this catastrophic war. A nation of eleven or twelve millions holds the path to the Adriatic and the Aegean and the gateway to the Orient and world dominion. It can help to make impossible the dream of mid-Europe or of Pan-Germany.
The Jugo-Slav movement has ended in the formation of a nation which is neither a doctrine, nor a dream, but a reality.
APPENDICES DECLARATION OF THE JUGO-SLAV CLUB OF THE AUSTRIAN PARLIAMENT
ON MAY 30, 1917
"The undersigned deputies, assembled as the 'Jugo-slav Club,' taking their stand on the principle of nationalities and on the rights of the Croatian state, declare that they demand that all the countries in which Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs live shall be united in an independent and democratic state organism, free from the domination of any foreign nation and placed under the sceptre of the dynasty Habsburg-Lorraine. They declare that they will employ all their forces to realize this demand of their single nation. The undersigned will take part in the parliamentary labor after having made this reserve...."
[FN: Referring to the Declaration of the Jugo-Slav Club, May
30, 1917, in the Vienna Parliament J. J. Grgurevich,
Secretary of the South Slavic National Council, Washington,
D. C., writes:
"In order to understand correctly this Declaration, it is
necessary to state that the same was presented in the Vienna
Parliament during war time, when each, even the most
innocent, word in regard to rights, principles of
nationality, and liberty of peoples, was considered and
punished as a crime and treason, by imprisonment, even
death.
"Were it not for these facts, this Declaration would never
contain the words: 'and placed under the sceptre of the
dynasty Habsburg-Lorraine.' It was, therefore, necessary to
insert these words in order to make possible the public
announcement of this Declaration; it was necessary to make a
moral sacrifice for the sake of a great moral and material
gain, which was secured through this Declaration among the
people to which it was addressed and which understood it in
the sense and in the spirit of the Declaration of Corfu.">[