AUSTRIA UNDER FRANCIS JOSEPH
shrewd enough to induce Francis Joseph to conclude a close alliance with Germany, to which Italy was added a few years later; at the same time he secured his own position by a secret agreement with Russia, but Austria-Hungary proceeded in her anti-Slav policy, which was to lead inevitably to a rupture with Russia. Austria-Hungary had not dared to attack Russia openly, but, in 1878, Bosnia and Herzegovina were occupied, and Serbia, under King Milan, forced into a policy of abject vassalage.
In internal policy Vienna had to yield to some extent to Bohemia. Count Taaffe, who was of Irish descent, came to an agreement with the Czechs, as a result of which they abandoned their so-called "passive policy," which had consisted in boycotting the central Parliament of Vienna. In the year 1879 the Czechs took their seats in Parliament, and since that time Vienna, by small concessions, has tried to win the Bohemian nation. This endeavour seemed the more necessary, as in Vienna itself the Clerical leader, Dr. Lueger, had found many adherents in his opposition to Magyar predominance. Hungary, it must be remembered, when united with Austria and Bohemia in 1526, had fallen into Turkish hands, and it was only at the end of the seventeenth century that she was liberated by their joint efforts. By the middle of the nineteenth century, when her influence began to grow, Austria and Bohemia had become industrialised, and Hungary served as their granary. Hungary's economic strength first became manifest in the revolution of 1848. The introduction of Dualism, and their subservience to Berlin and its Pangerman policy, strengthened the Magyars; Dr. Lueger opposed Hungary by adopting the old centralist programme of a united and therefore "Greater Austria." In Bohemia the party of the Old Czechs, who had concluded the agreement with Taaffe, was repudiated by the nation at the elections in 1889 to the Diet of Prague, and in 1891 to the Viennese Parliament. The Young Czech party, with whom victory rested, were the representatives of the more radical national and democratic Bohemian movement, which was to culminate in the truly Austrian policy of martial law. The Emperor tried to win over Bohemia, and it was the Pole, Count Badeni, who issued a decree restoring to some extent the rights of the Czech language. The Germans began in Parliament their policy of obstruction, and Badeni had soon
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