Behind the Cables.

An appalling situation in the Serb kingdom seems rapidly to be coming to a head. The country, like its neighbors, is broke, and has had to default on or put off its foreign debt. The new constitution has turned out to be almost unworkable as the overt dictatorship, and the Serb-Croat quarrel is as bitter as ever. The Slovenes and Bosnians, heretofore fairly tractable, have joined the Croats in their demand for federalism, and the king, the chief centripetal force of the state, is apparently no longer able personally to bridge the various widening schisms. For a whole series of perplexing foreign irritations has developed, doubtless in correspondence to the ascending domestic alarms. Some Dalmatian hotheads mutilated the old Venetian lions in Trogir.