In September 1891, Chamberlain visited Bosnia and Herzegovina as a journalist. In 1878, the Ottoman provinces of Bosnia-Herzegovina had been occupied by Austria-Hungary; though the two provinces remained nominally Ottoman until 1908, in practice they were part of the Austrian empire from 1878 onwards. Because Bosnia-Herzegovina was still officially part of the Ottoman Empire, neither province was represented in the Austrian "Reichsrat" or the Hungarian Diet, and instead the two provinces were in practice a colony of Austria-Hungary. Chamberlain had been commissioned by the Austrian government to write propaganda glorying its colonial rule of Bosnia-Herzegovina for a Geneva newspaper. Chamberlain's articles about Bosnia reveal his increasing preference for dictatorship over democracy with Chamberlain praising the Austrians for having utterly no democratic aspects to their rule of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Chamberlain wrote that what he had seen in Bosnia-Herzegovina was the perfect example of Wagner's dictum: "Absolute monarch – free people!" Chamberlain declared that the Bosnians were extremely lucky not to have the shambles and chaos of a democratic "parliamentary regime", instead being ruled by an idealist, enlightened dictatorship that did what was best for them. Equally important in Chamberlain's Bosnian articles was his celebration of "natural man" who lived on the land as a small farmer as opposed to what Chamberlain saw as the corrupt men who lived in modern industrial, urban society. At the time Chamberlain visited Bosnia-Herzegovina, the provinces had been barely touched by modernization, and for the most part, Bosnians continued to live much as their ancestors had done in the Middle Ages. Chamberlain was enchanted with what he saw, and forgetting for the moment that the purpose of his visit was to glorify Austrian rule, expressed much sadness in his articles that the "westernization" being fostered by the Austrians would destroy the traditional way of life in Bosnia. Chamberlain wrote about the average Bosnian: