Now, it is needful to note and it is important to remember, that the figures which I quote, are incorrect, because they are those furnished by the Government statistics at Vienna and at Budapest by German and Magyar officials. These have their instructions to use various artful tricks for falsifying systematically the true statistics in favour of their own races, in order to contribute by that stratagem to the maintenance, as long as possible, of the supremacy held by the Germans and the Magyars. In truth, there are in Austria-Hungary far less than 22 million Germans and Magyars, and far more than 28 Slavs and Latins. What again is certain, is that for centuries the Slavs and Latins have been oppressed in Austria-Hungary in the most odious fashion by a feudal aristocracy, who engross enormous landed properties, and who exercise in the Hapsburg Monarchy as baneful a social influence as that of the _Junkers_ in Prussia. With the exception of the Polish aristocracy of Galicia and a small group of Ruthenes, who since 1867 joined hands with the Germans, all these Slavs and Latins have been endeavouring to the very utmost, especially for the last thirty years, to obtain, in accordance with modern justice, such political rights as are proportionate to their numbers. In that way they hope to win for themselves in the Monarchy the legal majority that is their due, by reason of their being human flesh and blood liable to be taxed and to be called on for service at the will of the Government. These tendencies have long excited extreme alarm in William II. and his Pangermans. This is readily understood, for, if the political power, in the Hapsburg Monarchy, were vested, as justice demands, in the Slavs and Latins, who hate Prussianism, that in itself would have been the ruin of the Kaiser’s plan for the economic absorption of Austria-Hungary. Yet this very absorption is indispensable to William II. if he is to carry out his inadmissible plans of exclusive influence in the Balkans and in the East. His game has therefore been, especially since 1890, to say, in the main, to Francis Joseph and to the Magyars: “Above all, do not concede the claims of your Slav and Latin subjects. Keep up absolutely the Germano-Magyar supremacy. I will uphold you, with all my power, in your struggle with the Slav-Latin elements.” For a long time these tactics of the Kaiser were successful but they were on the point of breaking down a short time before the war.