What then are the forces which have held Austria-Hungary together under Francis Joseph? First unquestionably comes the dynasty; for it would be difficult to over-estimate the power exercised by the dynastic tradition on the many races under Habsburg sway. Next comes the Joint Army; for there is no finer body of men in Europe than the Austrian officers' corps, poorly paid, hard-worked, but inspired to the last man with unbounded devotion to the Imperial house, and to a large extent immune from that spirit of caste which is the most offensive feature of the allied German army.[1] Hardly less important are the Catholic Church, with its vast material resources and its powerful influence on peasant, small tradesman and court alike, and the bureaucracy, with its traditions of red tape, small-mindedness, slowness of movement and genial Gemütlichkeit ("easy-goingness"). It is only after these forces that we can fairly count the parliaments and representative government. And yet there are no fewer than twenty-three legislative bodies in the Monarchy—the two central parliaments of Vienna and Budapest, entirely distinct from each other; the two Delegations; the provincial Diets, seventeen in Austria, one in Croatia; and the Diet of Bosnia, whose every legislative act requires the ratification of the Joint Minister of Finance and of the Austrian and Hungarian Governments.
[Footnote 1: It is in no way a "preserve" of the aristocracy, being largely recruited from the middle and even lower-middle class.]
Against all this there is one supremely disintegrating force—the principle of Nationality. Only a map can make clear the racial complications of the Dual Monarchy, and even the largest scale map fails to show how inextricably the various races are interwoven in many districts of Hungary or Bohemia. The following table offers at least a statistical survey:
(1) Racial— Austria. Hungary. Bosnia.
Germans 9,950,266 2,037,435 ..
Czechs {6,435,983 .. ..
Slovaks { 1,967,970 ..
Poles 4,967,984 .. ..
Ruthenes 3,518,854 472,587 ..
Magyars (including
900,000 Jews) .. 10,050,575 ..
Croats } 783,334 1,833,162 {1,875,000
Serbs } 1,106,471 {
Slovenes 1,252,940 .. ..
Roumanians 275,422 2,949,032 ..
Italians 768,422 27,307 ..
Others .. 374,105 ..
(2) Religious—
Roman Catholic 22,530,000 10,888,138 451,686
Uniate Catholic 3,417,000 2,025,508 ..
Orthodox 660,000 2,987,163 856,158
Calvinist } 589,000 2,621,329 ..
Lutheran } 1,340,143 ..
Mohammedan .. .. 626,649
Jewish 1,314,000 932,458 ..
Minor Sects 56,000 91,748 ..
Total population 28,324,940 20,886,487 1,898,044
§4. The Genesis of the Southern Slavs.—The foregoing survey of tendencies in Austria-Hungary is utterly incomplete and inadequate, but it may perhaps serve as a basis for further study. Let us now consider her rival in the dispute which has led to the great war—Serbia.
Here, at the outset, it cannot be emphasised too strongly that those who regard the problem merely as a dispute between the government of Vienna and the government of Belgrade have not grasped even its elements. The Southern Slav question goes far deeper and wider than that; it must be treated as a whole, and of it Serbia is only a part. In any study of the Slavonic races the first fact which emerges is that they fall naturally into two main groups—the northern and the southern—divided by a solid wedge of three non-Slavonic races, the German, the Magyar, and the Roumanian, stretching from the Kiel Canal to the Black Sea. It is with the southern group that we are concerned.
The Southern Slavs fall into four sections—the Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, and Bulgars, who between them occupy the whole country from southern Carinthia to central Thrace. The significance of the Bulgars will be dealt with elsewhere, and of the Slovenes it will suffice for our present purpose to say that they are a small and ancient race, of vigorous stock and clerical leanings, whose true importance lies in their geographical position and its latent possibilities for the future. The Croats and Serbs occupy the border-line between West and East, between Rome and Byzantium, between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Broadly speaking, every Croat is a Catholic, every Serb an Orthodox. Broadly speaking again, the Croat language is Serb written with Latin characters, the Serb language Croat written in the Cyrilline alphabet.
Despite their common language, the two kindred races have never all been united under a single ruler. From the ninth to the end of the eleventh century the Duchy, then Kingdom, of Croatia was governed by native princes, upon whose extinction it was conquered by Hungary. For eight centuries Croatia has enjoyed an autonomous position under the Holy Crown of St. Stephen; its scope has varied according to the political constellation, but till 1912 its constant tradition had remained unbroken. Meanwhile the Dalmatian coast towns remained a bone of contention between Venice and Hungary; but the marble Lions on their battered walls are still the best proof of the triumph of Italian culture within them. Ragusa alone resisted both Venetians and Turks, and preserved herself inviolate as the home of commerce and the muses, until her tiny Republic was destroyed by Napoleon in 1808. The Kingdom of Serbia developed on more distinctively Slavonic lines. During its great days in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries under the Nemanja dynasty it dominated the Balkan Peninsula, produced a code of law which is unique in mediaeval records, developed a prosperous commerce and mining industries, and seemed on the point of striking a new note in architecture. Her greatest Tsar, Stephen Dushan, died mysteriously of poison, when his hosts were already thundering at the gates of Constantinople (1356). But the greatness of his empire did not survive him, and only a generation later Serbian independence received its death-blow on the fatal field of Kosovo—the Flodden of the Balkans, but an event far direr in its consequences than Flodden was to Scotland. Bosnia and a fragment of Serbia lingered on under more or less independent rulers till the middle of the fifteenth century. Then the Turkish night replaced the Turkish twilight. From 1463 to 1804 the national life of the Serbs lay utterly crushed. In Serbia their nobility was literally wiped out, in Bosnia it accepted Islam in order to save its lands. The relations of conqueror and conquered are best characterised by the single fact that a Christian who failed to dismount from his horse on meeting a Turk was liable to be killed on the spot.