M. Sazonof went to the root of the matter at once in a conversation with the Austrian representative in Petrograd. This is the Austrian version (24th July)-- “The participation of Imperial and Royal (Austrian) officials in the suppression of the revolutionary movements elicited further protest on the part of the minister. Serbia then will no longer be master in her own house. You will always be wanting to interfere again, and what a life you will lead Europe.” “_Serbia would no longer be master in her own house._” There was the key to Austrian ambitions. The independence of Serbia was to be violated, her territory was to admit foreign officials, and gradually a small nation was to disappear into the patchwork-quilt possessions of the _Dual Monarchy_. There you have the sinister House of the Hapsburgs exposed in the very act of pressing the button, and releasing the current which has shattered the fabric of Europe. Swaddle and disguise it as you will in words, there is the seed of origin of the European War. There is no plainer transaction in history: the clock has a crystal face that allow us to see all the works. You may, if you will, call up a mist of eloquence and people it with ghosts, the ghosts of wicked things done by English in Ireland and India, Russians in Finland, French in Morocco, Italians in Tripoli, Belgians in the Congo, and Serbians all the way back to Kosovo. You may write at length of the inherent perils of the “European system,” the expansion of races, the discharge of long accumulating thunder-clouds, of _Hauptströmungen_, of iron laws of destiny, and all the rest of the lurid, deterministic farrago of sham omniscience which forms the stock-in-trade of the German savant. You may point out that there is a sense in which all previous history is behind even the least important event in history, and that the Austrian ultimatum did but set a match to a long-laid train. Much of what you say will be true, and much will also be horrible. But nothing can alter the fact that this war originated in the attempt of a great Empire to exploit legitimate anger against crime in order to destroy the independence of a small State; that the small State, having accepted every other humiliation, offered to submit in this to the judgment of either of the recognised international tribunals, and that the great Empire refused.