Among the Slovenes, politics degenerated into the struggle for minor
concessions from the court at Vienna in regard to the Slovene language and
schools, while political parties multiplied freely through personal and
social differences. The lines which bound them to their kinsmen in the
south were weakest during this period.
The Croats found themselves no match for the astute Magyars who resorted to
packed diets, gerrymandering, bribery, and forgery. The Compromise (Nagoda)
of 1868 was as decisive as the murder of the farsighted Prince Michael
of Serbia in that year. It will be remembered that, in spite of his many
faults, he had made an agreement with Montenegro for the ultimate merging
of their states and, after allying himself with Rumania, had carried out
an agreement with the Bulgarian committee for the amalgamation of Bulgaria
with Serbia, thus obtaining a commanding influence in the Balkans. With his
death, Serbia fell into the hands of Milan and Alexander, whose weak and
erratically despotic reigns ushered in an era in Serbian history from which
she emerged in 1903, through the assassination and the extinction of the
last of the Obrenovics, a country without a good name, a nation which,
through no special fault of its own, had become degraded.
It was in the midst of this political decay that the Bosnians revolted in
1875 and that Serbia, Montenegro, Russia, and Rumania became involved in
the Russo-Turkish war.
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