Excerpt from The Southern Slav Question: And the Habsburg Monarchy No country in Europe presents such a variety of complicated problems for solution as the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy; and among these, none is more important and more pressing than the Southern Slav Question. In it are involved the future fortunes of the whole Croat and Serb race, and through them the fate of the Western half of the Balkan Peninsula - from the Gulf of Trieste to the Bulgarian frontier, from the plains of Southern Hungary to the mountains of Albania. On it depends the balance of power on the Adriatic, with all its bearings upon the international situation. Above all, the Southern Slav Question may at any moment exercise a decisive influence upon the foreign policy of Vienna, and upon the internal development of the Dual Monarchy. For on the one hand Austria cannot hope to extend her influence in the Balkans, unless she enlists in her cause the sympathies and support of her eight millions of Southern Slav subjects; while on the other hand, the Croato-Serb race, by reason of its geographical and strategic position, has it in its power by a strict alliance with Austria against Hungary, to destroy completely in favour of the former the balance upon which the Dual System is based, and so to play havoc with the entire mechanism and pave the way for that compromise between federalism and centralism through which alone the acute racial problems of the Dual Monarchy can be solved. The present volume attempts to trace the growth of national feeling among the Croats and Serbs of the Dual Monarchy, and to describe in fuller detail the more recent movement in favour of Croato-Serb Unity. The fact that the English language contains no book devoted to the history of this movement, must be my excuse for occasional prolixity; not merely the main building, but even the substructure had to be created. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.