Out of these discords grew the World War, as a result of Austria’s effort to crush the most dangerous of the nationalist movements threatening her from within by striking at its outside source. But this War, which was to have saved her, turned out to be her ruin, not only by involving her in military disasters, but even more, perhaps, by accelerating her internal decomposition. Far from reinvigorating the monarchy by drawing all its races together in a great outburst of patriotism and a great common effort--as Teuton propagandists used to tell us that it had done--the War had just the contrary effect. The indignation of so many Hapsburg races at being forced to fight for a cause of which they disapproved; the attempt of the authorities to stifle this discontent by imprisoning, shooting, or hanging tens of thousands of people; the many signs that the Austrian Germans, intoxicated with enthusiasm for Prussia, were yearning to apply Prussian methods to their old domestic enemies and to make _tabula rasa_ of those inferior peoples who, as a German writer put it, were “only a burden upon history,” and could “serve only as mortar for a nobler race”; the consciousness that in case of a victory for the Central Powers Austria would emerge bound hand and foot to the chariot of Germany and the anti-German races were doomed; finally, and not least, the psychological effects of war-weariness and economic misery, which have more or less shattered empires better knit together than this one--all these things combined to raise to a white heat the discontent of the majority of the Hapsburg races and to make them resolve that they would stand this Austrian nightmare no longer, if the Allies would only hold out to them a helping hand. The Allies had certainly had little serious intention of disrupting Austria, at the beginning or throughout the greater part of the War. The traditional belief that Austria was a “European necessity,” the illusion that she could serve as a bulwark against the expansion of Germany towards the southeast or of Russia towards the Adriatic, the hope that she might be detached from Germany and persuaded to make a separate peace, the fear that the disappearance of the monarchy would lead only to the ‘Balkanization’ of Central Europe and to chaos worse confounded--such ideas seem to have predominated at London, Paris, and perhaps Washington, even down to the last year of the War. As late as January 8, 1918, President Wilson, in formulating the Fourteen Points, still disclaimed the thought of impairing the integrity of Austria, and asked for her subject races nothing more than autonomy.