This disappointment led the Croats and Serbs to try cooperation with the
Magyars, who under Deak and Eoetvoes appeared to be anxious to conciliate
the non-Magyars in those uncertain years which began in 1859 and ended
in dualism. Austria lacked a great statesman, and the Prusso-Austrian
rivalry led the fearful and impatient Francis Joseph into the Compromise
(Ausgleich) of 1867. It was a work of haste and expediency and bound with
it the fate of the dynasty. Thereafter, the German minority in Austria and
the Magyar minority in Hungary were the decisive factors in the problems
confronting the Jugo-Slavs. Dalmatia was handed over to Austria; Croatia,
by a compromise, which it has never really accepted, to Hungary.
The Ausgleich between Austria and Hungary and Hungary and Croatia opened in
1868 a period which ended in 1905--it was a period, on the one hand of the
greatest decay and decomposition in the political life of the Jugo-Slavs,
and, on the other, of the greatest literary and intellectual unity as
shaped by Bishop Strossmayer and Peter II and Nicholas of Montenegro.
Bishop Strossmayer and the Slovene, Croat, and Serb academies, matica, and
learned societies, as well as men of literature, spoke, wrote, and pleaded
for unity in this period, in vain. But they and the universities of Prague
and Zagreb produced a younger generation which later took up the fight for
national unity and which abandoned individual political foibles and looked
over the boundaries of their provinces for inspiration.
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