How these shots--heard alas! farther and more disastrously than that of Emerson’s embattled farmers!--came to be fired is a plain story often told, and never disputed or disputable. It will be sufficient to recall the main features of it. On the 28th of June the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Emperor Francis Joseph, and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo, the capital of the province of Bosnia, annexed to Austria-Hungary in 1909. Any reader of the English or French papers of that time will remember the sincere and universal sympathy expressed for the old unhappy Emperor, and his ill-starred realm and family. It was a crime that awakened horror throughout Europe. The annexation had been cynical, but crime is no cure for crime. In general character and consequences there is an historic act which presents remarkable resemblances to the Sarajevo outrage, I mean the Phœnix Park murders. In each case irresponsible men stained a good cause, and in each case an attempt was made to indict a nation. The assassins were arrested, Prinzip who had fired the fatal pistol-shots, and Cabinovitch who had thrown bombs. They were in the hands of the law, and exemplary justice might reasonably be expected. The seething pot of Balkan politics, said the average man in these countries, had boiled up once more in noxious scum. It was another tragic episode. And so people in the Entente countries turned back to their own troubles. How acute these troubles were we are now in danger of forgetting, but we have learned enough since then of the German political psychologist and his ways to conclude that they were a prime factor in subsequent decisions. The threat of civil war in “Ulster,” an unprecedented crisis in the Army, gun-running, arming and drilling public and secret, a woman suffrage and a labour movement, both so far gone in violence as to be on the immediate edge of anarchy, left the Government of these countries little leisure for the politics of the Near East. France was in serious difficulties as regards her public finance, violent fiscal controversies were impending, the Caillaux trial threatened to rival that of Dreyfus in releasing savage passions, the military unpreparedness of the country was notorious. Russia naturally stood far closer to Serbia, but labour riots in Petrograd, a revival of revolutionary activity, and widespread menace of internal disturbance seemed hopelessly to cripple her. Nothing could have been more remote from the desire of any of the Entente nations than a European war springing out of Sarajevo.