The annexation policy of Count von Aehrenthal, which may well be regarded as one of the indirect causes of the present war, had other unfortunate effects on the Dual Monarchy. The ease with which the triumph had been won led the bullies of Vienna and Buda-Pesth to imagine that high-handed methods would always be successful. They fancied that the Tsar’s Government, from fear of seeing the two Germanic Empires ranged against it, would not dare to cross Austria-Hungary’s path, if the latter set herself one day to chastise Serbia. The clash of the Habsburg monarchy with the valiant people of Kara George over the Bosnian question was only the first lunge in a duel where the weaker of the two adversaries, compelled to be wary, became all the more dangerous in that he shifted his ground. A subterranean movement carried on by Pan-Serb societies which had long been at work with alternating fits of activity and quiescence began from this time forth to excite, without respite, the separatist feeling of the Bosnian and Croat communities. This was the most definite result of Aehrenthal’s rash policy, but he did not live to see it come to pass. He had tried to pour fresh blood into the veins of that great emaciated body, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to make this dotard, racked with incurable diseases, play an active part on the European stage. All that he did was to embitter the mutual hatred of Austria and Serbia, and, by laying rash hands upon the work of Bismarck, Beaconsfield, and Andrassy, to revive the Eastern question—that fiery furnace, dreaded by several generations of diplomats, which still smouldered beneath the ashes of the Treaty of Berlin. II. Two years passed. Germany spent them in recovering, bit by bit, the ground she had lost at Constantinople after the dethronement of Abdul Hamid. Her dexterous ambassador succeeded in winning the elusive confidence of the Committee of Union and Progress, just as he had won that of the despot. The enterprises of German finance and industry were spreading their tentacles further and further in Asiatic Turkey. The Turkish army acquired the obvious stamp of Prussian discipline, although the corps of officers, in losing the old Ottoman spirit handed down by its forbears, was somewhat shorn of its martial qualities; it concerned itself too much with politics, and not enough with the men under its command. During the Agadir crisis the Near East remained outwardly quiet, except in Crete, where the people’s eagerness to be reunited with the Hellenic mother-country became more and more difficult to curb.