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support, that one of his junior officials and the spy Vasić concocted those voluminous forgeries which figured in the famous Friedjung trial at Vienna in December, 1909. It was he to whom the responsibility for these forgeries was finally brought home by Professor Masaryk in a series of scathing speeches in the Austrian Delegation. It was on this occasion that Forgách was publicly branded with the insulting name of Count "Azev," and that Count Aehrenthal listened in embarrassed silence, instead of defending his subordinate against a comparison with the most infamous agent provo- cateur of the Russian revolution. The late Emperor is known to have been furious at the discredit thrown upon Austrian diplomacy by the Friedjung trial; but his fury took the form of reproaching his ministers, not for having repeated the methods so widely employed in Lombardy and Venetia in thef orties and fifties, but for having imitated them so clumsily as to be found out. Nothing is more characteristic of Austrian and Habsburg methods than the fact that Forgách, after his public exposure, was made a Privy Councillor and appointed to the honourable position of Minister in Dresden, and that, after a comparatively short interval, he was pro- moted to the Ballplatz itself, as permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs. Throughout the critical period, 1912- 1914, Count Forgách played a decisive part in the Balkan policy of Austria-Hungary. The easy-going methods of his new chief, Count Berchtold, left him free to develop his Magyar proclivities in an anti-Slav direction, in close con- junction with the Hungarian Government. He was largely responsible for the anti-Serb press campaign which brought the Monarchy to the verge of war with Serbia in November, 1912. It was on his instructions that Prochaska, the consul in Prizrend, attempted to "make" an incident with Serbia and that public opinion in Vienna and Budapest was allowed. for a fortnight to believe that he had been brutally mutilated. by Serbian officers. It was he who did more than any other man to prevent Serbia's overtures to Vienna from receiving a friendly welcome, and he worked steadily in conjunction with Count Tisza as Hungarian Premier and Count Tarnowski as Minister in Sofia, to undermine the Balkan League and set Serbia and Bulgaria at each other's throats. Finally he was, with Count Tisza and the late German Ambassador, Herr von Tschirschky, the joint author of the Austro-Hun-

garian Note to Serbia, which was the immediate cause of the