more fully because its investigation will reveal both the measure of Hungary's responsibility for, and also the ultimate causes of, the European War.
Since the Turkish race had lost its aggressive power, Hungary's chief danger was from Russian expansion, Pan-Slavism and Orthodoxy. Even Peter the Great had attempted to get into touch with those Serbs who fled from Turkish persecution into Hungary. Ever since then, the Czar had taken the whole of the Orthodox Slav world more and more under his wing. The Crimean War checked Russian ambition, but in the 'seventies the old danger became acute once more when Ignatiew incited the Russian Court to pursue an active Balkan policy. After the victories of the Russian Armies, it seemed as if the Czars would come to realize their ancient dreams by the erection of the double cross on the Hagia Sophia, and that Christendom in the Balkans would be ruled from Moscow.
If the idea of Ignatiew had materialized, then the situation for the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy would have been impossible. The Monarchy would have been paralysed economically as well as politically if Cettinje, Belgrade, Warsaw and Moscow had been subject to one ruler. She would have been surrounded by an iron ring, and her internal power of resistance would have been sapped. Irredentism would have gathered new force from the predominance of Czarism. Ignatiew himself revealed the danger that lay hidden in the Pan-Slavic idea, for in his memoirs he confesses candidly that his aims were not the formation of independent
