CHAPTER I
THE assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Hapsburg throne, by an Austrian Serb in Serajevo, the Bosnian capital, on June 28 served to bring back to European attention suddenly and violently the great dream of the Serbs, which after slumbering for long centuries, was awakened by the triumph of Kumanovo and stimulated by the splendid victory on the Bregalnitza. It was the sober judgment of not a few European statesmen that the Balkan wars had created a Slavic state as dangerous to Austria as the aggrandized Sardinia which was the work of the Congress of Vienna, a state as certain to seek to achieve the liberation and unity of the Southern Slavs as Sardinia was to strive for the redemption of Italy. The bombs and bullets in Serajevo were a prompt confirmation of this forecast.
To-day the Serbs of southeastern Europe number some 7,000,000, occupying a compact territory between the Adriatic and the Drave. Half of them