Among the Slovenes, politics degenerated into the struggle for minor concessions from the court at Vienna in regard to the Slovene language and schools, while political parties multiplied freely through personal and social differences. The lines which bound them to their kinsmen in the south were weakest during this period. The Croats found themselves no match for the astute Magyars who resorted to packed diets, gerrymandering, bribery, and forgery. The Compromise (Nagoda) of 1868 was as decisive as the murder of the farsighted Prince Michael of Serbia in that year. It will be remembered that, in spite of his many faults, he had made an agreement with Montenegro for the ultimate merging of their states and, after allying himself with Rumania, had carried out an agreement with the Bulgarian committee for the amalgamation of Bulgaria with Serbia, thus obtaining a commanding influence in the Balkans. With his death, Serbia fell into the hands of Milan and Alexander, whose weak and erratically despotic reigns ushered in an era in Serbian history from which she emerged in 1903, through the assassination and the extinction of the last of the Obrenovics, a country without a good name, a nation which, through no special fault of its own, had become degraded. It was in the midst of this political decay that the Bosnians revolted in 1875 and that Serbia, Montenegro, Russia, and Rumania became involved in the Russo-Turkish war. Space forbids but the most hasty survey of the occupation and administration by Austria of Bosnia and the Herzegovina by virtue of the Treaty of Berlin in 1878. Bismarck, Francis Joseph, and Andrassy were swayed by differing motives whose total result was that Austria was to become a Balkan power--the outpost of the German _Drang nach Osten_--and that it was worth while making a greater Serbia impossible, even at the cost of increasing the number of Slavs in the Habsburg monarchy, which, now reenforced by the Ausgleich, could stand the strain of advancing democracy and the necessity, therefore, of granting further rights to the Slavs.