Had Austria, in annexing Bosnia changed her traditional policy, it is possible she might have avoided what followed. But into Bosnia she carried the spirit which brought her ruin in Northern Italy in the nineteenth century. In the meantime the Hungarian Government pursued a similar policy of repression and cruelty toward the Croatians. Finally the Slovenes found themselves caught between Italian and German ambitions, since in the long promised break up of Austria, both nations planned to lay hands upon Trieste, a city Italian by population but a mere enclave in the Slovene block.
Thus it was that even before the great Serb triumph over Turkey, the Southern Slavs of Austria-Hungary, encouraged undoubtedly by the Pan-Slav propagandists of Russia, began to dream of a union with their independent Serb brethren. When Servia suddenly emerged from her long eclipse and won her splendid triumphs over the Turk, the imagination of the Croats and of the Bosnian Serbs was equally fired. When Austria, taking alarm, began to bully Servia, the indignation in her Serb and Croat provinces made it necessary to declare martial law. When Austrian troops were mobilized as a menace to Servia, it was necessary to send only German troops from Austria's Teutonic provinces and Hungarians, for the Slavs openly threatened to mutiny.
The Austrian championship of the cause of the