The reconstruction of South-Eastern Europe

THE RECONSTRUCTION OF

systems under which the peoples in AustriaHungary were constrained to live. The Dual Settlement was not intended to last for ever, and it outlived the term reasonably assigned to it. After' fifty years of wear and tear it became shabby and obsolete. In some very important quarters in Vienna, whose leader was supposed to be the late Archduke Francis Ferdinand, it was thought that the Dual Settlement had yielded its maximum of good, and the time had come for it to make room for another system. To Archduke Ferdinand was attributed the idea of “the Trialism,” as a new experiment in the life of the monarchy, which was to begin on his ascending the throne.

The idea of the Trialism consisted in this: the Dual Settlement was to be replaced by a new arrangement of the Hapsburg Monarchy by which Galicia was to be united on a basis of equality with Hungary proper. The kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia was to be taken away from Hungary and to be united with Bosnia, Hercegovina, Dalmatia, Istria and Carniola in a new Southern Slav kingdom as a third main part of the empire. It may be this scheme was the outcome of the mature thoughts of the late Archduke Ferdinand, who deemed it necessary to give some satisfaction to the national feelings of the Southern Slavs, and by a piece of creative policy to extirpate the spirit of brooding revolt among them, to win their loyalty, and perhaps

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