Farther to the west is the Prekomurdje, that interesting Slovene district which extends for about 25 miles along the Mur. The rich plain that adjoins the river is mostly in the possession of large landowners, while the hilly country to the north sustains a scattered and poor population of Calvinists. There are in the whole Prekomurdje some 120,000 Yugoslavs, who are descendants of the old Pannonian Slovenes. This healthy, honest people has indeed eighteen Catholic and eight Protestant priests, but is otherwise almost destitute of an intelligentsia. They speak nothing but Slovene, and yet the Magyars had for ten years previous to the War been so imperialist that only Magyar schools were tolerated. Thus it happened that the children, like so many others in the Magyar schools, were at a loss to understand what they were writing, and if their teacher chanced to learn the Slovene language he was there and then transferred to Transylvania or the Slovak country or some other province where he had to teach his pupils in the Magyar which they did not know. He was supposed to make the children feel the vast superiority of all things Magyar, so that they should be ashamed to walk with their own fathers in the streets and speak another tongue. We are told occasionally in the Morning Post that consideration should be shown to the Magyars since they are a proud people, but would they not merit more consideration if they were a grateful people, grateful that the rest of Europe, overlooking their Mongolian origin, has accepted them as equals? The Magyars were so thoroughly persuaded of their own pre-eminence that when the devotees of Haydn founded in his honour a society at Eisenstadt, where he had worked, it was allowed on the condition that the statutes and the name of the society and so forth should be in the Magyar language, although Haydn was a German. Evidently the poor Slovenes of the Prekomurdje would be swamped unless they showed exceptional vigour. And when they managed to survive until after the War the Americans in Paris were for handing them to Hungary on the ground that the frontier would, if it included them in Yugoslavia, be an awkward one. Such is also the opinion of Mr. A. H. E. Taylor in his The Future of the Southern Slavs; this author advocates that Yugoslavia should be bounded by the Mur, albeit in another part of the same book he says that "a small river is not usually a good frontier, except on the map"; and the Mur is so narrow that when Dr. Gaston Reverdy, of the French army, and I arrived at Ljutomir we found that a crowd of these men and boys had waded across the stream in order to lay their cause before the doctor, who represented the Entente in that region. The Bolševik Magyars were just then threatening to set all Prekomurdje on fire, and the pleasant-looking, rather shy men who stood in rows before us begged the doctor to procure them weapons—they would be able to defend themselves. It is satisfactory to know that most of this portion of the Yugoslav lands has, after all, not been lost to the mother country.

(f) THE AUSTRIAN FRONTIER

A considerable part of the frontier between Yugoslavia and Austria has been determined by a plebiscite which was held, under French, British and Italian control, in the autumn of 1920. The Slovenes during the previous year had pointed out that while they could no longer claim so wide a territory now that Austria had been drawn towards the Adriatic, yet the rural population of Carinthia had remained Slovene, thanks to the notable qualities of that people. The German-Austrians, on the other hand, maintained that country districts are the appanages of a town, so that the wishes of a rural population are of secondary importance. While these questions were being debated in 1919 by the two interested parties—and debated, very often, by their rifles—the Italians intervened. Sonnino's paper, the Epoca, made a great outcry over Klagenfurt (Celovec) which, if given to the Yugoslavs, would be an insurmountable barrier, it said, to the trade between Triest and Vienna, although it was clear that the railway connection through Tarvis remained in the hands of the Italians. (There is not a single Italian civilian in Tarvis—but no matter.) Meanwhile the French Press noted that the Italians—presumably not as traders but as benefactors—were seeing to it that the Austrians did not run short of arms and munitions. For many months a large area was in a condition of uncertainty and turmoil, till at last the Peace Conference ordered a plebiscite.

Two zones in Carinthia—"A" to the south-east, with its centre at Velikovec (Voelkermarkt), and "B" to the north-west, with its centre at Klagenfurt (Celovec)—were mapped out, and it was agreed that if the voting in "A," the larger zone, were favourable to Austria, then the other zone would automatically fall to that country. For several months before the voting day this area—a region of beautiful and prosperous valleys watered by the broad Drave and surrounded by magnificent mountain ranges—for several months this area was the scene of great activity. German-Austrians and Yugoslavs no longer, as in 1919, attacked each other with the implements of war, but with pamphlet, broadsheet, with eloquence and bribery. Austrian and Yugoslav officials took up their headquarters at various places and saw to it that every voter should be posted as to the moral and material advantage he would reap by helping to make the land Austrian or Yugoslav, as the case might be. All those were entitled to vote who, being twenty years of age in January 1919, had their habitual residence in this area; or, if not born in the district, had belonged to it or had their habitual residence there from, at least, January 1, 1912. The larger zone "A" was left under Yugoslav administration, while zone "B" was under the Austrian authorities; and the Inter-Allied officials exercised a very close supervision in order, for example, to protect the partisans of either side from undue repression at the hands of their opponents. Neither the Austrians nor the Yugoslavs lost any opportunities for saying in public that the Inter-Allied Commissions were honestly making every effort to be impartial. It was, however, unfortunate that Italy should have sent as her chief representative Prince Livio Borghese, who may have been as impartial as his colleagues, but whose reputation, whether merited or otherwise, could scarcely commend itself to the Yugoslavs. They believed that his activities in Buda-Pest, under the Bolševik regime, and afterwards in Vienna, had been very hostile to themselves. Each of the three allied commissioners had a staff of some fifty or sixty officials, whose upkeep and expenses were paid by the two interested countries.

If an average person had been asked to foretell the result of the plebiscite I suppose he would have said that in zone "A" the Yugoslavs and in zone "B" the Austrians would be successful. We have seen how the Slovene renaissance of the nineteenth century was met by the central authorities in Vienna (particularly after the German victory of 1871), and how the local functionaries assisted them. They argued that Austria with her miscellaneous races could only survive if one of them was supreme. Therefore they looked askance on every one who regarded himself as a Slovene; if he rose to be an official it had to be in another part of the Monarchy, while for the maintenance of Austria (oblivious to the argument that Austria was a perfectly unnatural affair) they favoured all those who announced themselves to be on the side of the predominant race. From 1903 onwards the Slovene language was barred from the courts of Carinthia, and if a person did not understand the language of the German magistrates he had to use an interpreter. The land was invaded by the German intelligentsia: professors, masters in primary and secondary schools, doctors, lawyers and so forth, excise officials and railway officials—in 1912 Carinthia possessed about 5000 of these and only 11/2 per cent. were Slovenes. Those among the Slovenes who were capable of serving in such positions were dispatched to Carniola, Dalmatia or preferably to the German-speaking lands of the Empire. A provincial agricultural authority was set up in 1910 which was recognized by the State and which enjoyed a monopoly. Its object was to aid the progress of agriculture by establishing and supporting agricultural schools, sending experts to the farmer, distributing subsidies for the purchase of machinery, artificial manure and so on. The council consisted of twenty-one members, of whom only one was a Slovene; the subsidies were given to those who were recognized as Germanophils, while requests were not permitted in the Slovene tongue. As for the electoral districts, they were so manipulated that one deputy represented 120,000 Slovenes and another represented 27,000 Germans. Constituencies in which there was a German majority were allowed to send two members, while the others only sent one. The German railway employees worked so thoroughly for pan-Germanism that various Slovenes were arrested—among them the mayor of a large village who wanted to travel from Celovec—for asking in the Slovene language for a ticket. With regard to schools, there were throughout Carinthia in 1860 some 28 Slovene and 56 Slovene-German foundations, whereas in 1914 there were 2 Slovene, 30 German and 84 mixed schools, where the two languages were supposed to co-exist; they were indeed the home of two languages, for the children were nearly all Slovene, whereas the teacher and the language he used were German. Among 230 masters only 20 could read and write Slovene. Qualified teachers who could satisfy this test were, as we have mentioned, sent to other parts of the Empire. So far did the system go that Slovene peasants upon whom the Government had forced a German education speedily forgot the two hundred words which they had learned, but as they had been taught no other script than the German they were accustomed to write the Slovene language with German Gothic characters. These peasants were fairly impervious to Germanization; their strong sense of national consciousness was supported by the books, religious and otherwise, which they received every year from some such society as that of St. Hermagoras at Celovec, which distributed half a million books a year among its 90,000 members.

But that which principally guided the peasant was the voice of his priest, and the vast majority of priests in zone "A" were Slovenes. This agricultural zone possesses no more than one or two small towns, where the priest is less regarded. The traders and artisans frequently look upon themselves as too highly cultured for the Church; they affect the "Los von Rom" and the Socialist movements. By holding these menaces over the Bishop's head a good deal of pressure could be brought to bear, and this was done by the Germans, who were of opinion that the Church unfairly encouraged the Slovenes. The Bishop of Celovec had both the zones in his diocese until some months before the plebiscite, when a temporary arrangement was made under which zone "A" was administered by a vicar. But in bygone years the Bishop, with these threats hanging over him, was wont to counsel prudence and to ask his clergy not to agitate their flock, whom they were merely telling of their rights. In zone "B," which mostly consists of the town of Celovec, the Church would naturally be more susceptible to German influence, apart from the fact that the Bishop himself is a Bavarian. For personal reasons—he is very imperfectly acquainted with the Slovene language—he wished even the clergy of zone "A" to correspond with him in German; but the priests pointed out that their faithful parishioners wanted to follow this correspondence and by far the greater number of them have no German.... In fact the Church has in each zone brought its help to the more powerful party—the Slovene peasants in zone "A" and the German or Germanophil townsfolk in zone "B"; and it appeared probable before the plebiscite that in both cases she would be on the victorious side.

In foretelling the result of the plebiscite one would not pay much attention to the census which the German-Austrian officials used to take. A person was inscribed according to the language he ordinarily employed, and this was, more often than not, considered to be German if his superior was a German. Before the census of 1910 the Grazer Tagblatt, which is the Germans' chief organ in those parts, proclaimed that the official census was a portion of the national propaganda. All the propagandist societies were entreated to do their utmost to induce the people to declare German as their usual language. Very humorous results were obtained. On December 18, 1910, the provincial council of public instruction gave out the number of German and Slovene children respectively in thirty Slovene parishes. Amongst them were the following:

German Children. Slovene Children. Borovlje (Ferlach) 31 per cent. 69 per cent. Grabštajn (Grafenstein) 10.6 " 89.4 " Žrelc (Ebenthal) 24.4 " 75.6 " Pokrče (Poggersdorf) 1.3 " 98.7 " Bistrica (Feistritz) 16.2 " 82.8 "

And twelve days later the official census gave these results:

Germans. Slovenes. Borovlje 90 per cent. 10 per cent. Grabštajn 50.1 " 49.9 " Žrelc 49.2 " 50.8 " Pokrče 41.1 " 58.9 " Bistrica 44.4 " 55.6 "

Far more trustworthy is the almanac issued every year by the Church, wherein a person's "usual language" is taken to be that in which he listens to the word of God. These ecclesiastical lists were published by German bishops, and according to them we find that the region we are considering held in 1910 some 40,000 Germans and 123,000 Slovenes.

We have seen that Celovec, like the smaller towns in this area, leans more to the Austrians than to the Yugoslavs. This is partly the effect of the Austrian Government's policy and partly of the various pan-German societies (e.g. the "Kaerntner Bauernbund," the "Verein der Alldeutschen," the "Deutscher Volksverein," etc. etc.), which, as was admitted, drew their funds to a considerable extent from Germany herself.

The German Republic was very lavish in assisting her smaller Austrian sister during the period before the plebiscite, pouring both goods and cash into the district; and after the opening of the demarcation line between the two zones at the beginning of August they were able to introduce their supplies quite openly into zone "A." Very few Germans of the north believe that the German-Austrian Republic will permanently remain separated from themselves.... Both Yugoslavs and Austrians circulated vast quantities of printed matter; for the Yugoslavs the most convincing argument lay in Austria's apparently hopeless economic position and the undesirability of belonging to a State which had to pay so huge a debt; the Austrian pamphlets denounced the Serbs as a military race, though even such a dealer in false evidence as the eminent Austrian historian, Dr. Friedjung, would find it difficult to sustain the thesis that the wars engaged in by the Serbs during the last hundred years were more of an offensive than of a defensive character. In several prettily prepared handbooks the voters were implored by the Austrians not to be so old-fashioned as to plump for a monarchy when they had such a chance of becoming republicans; one could almost see the writer of these scornful phrases stop to wipe his over-heated brow after having pushed back his old Imperial and Royal headgear. You might imagine that the Austrians in their deplorable economic condition would have avoided this topic; on the contrary, they proclaimed that several commodities which were lacking in Yugoslavia could be furnished by them in abundance. One of these, they said, was salt; and certainly the Yugoslavs purchased a good deal of it, but that was only when they did not know that it was German salt, which the Austrians bought in that country and on which they made an adequate profit. When the Yugoslavs wanted to get their supplies direct from Germany the Austrians introduced a transit tax of 1000 crowns—not the nearly worthless Austrian but Yugoslav crowns—per waggon. Later on when the Danube was thrown open and this tax could not be levied, salt was considerably cheaper in Yugoslavia than in Austria. So with plums—in 1919 Austria bought nearly the whole of the exports from Yugoslavia at six crowns per kilo and sold them to Germany at eleven to twelve crowns, the profit going, so the authorities said, to the poor.

As the day of the plebiscite approached, the Yugoslavs seemed to be more confident than the Austrians. The staunch peasants of zone "A" were not greatly impressed by the numerous appeals to their heart and brain which were handed to them by the Austrians in the Slovene language. And they were not much alarmed at the idea of being joined to their countrymen of the south, those unmitigated Serbs who thrived, if one was to believe the Austrian propaganda, on atrocities. But this warning was ridiculed by the Austrians themselves—on a market day at Velikovec you could see the Austrophils wearing their colours, which they would scarcely have done if they had been afraid of possible reprisals—and zone "A" was generally presumed to have a Yugoslav majority. On such a market day one saw very few Yugoslav colours in the farmers' button-holes, for it was the wish of their leaders to avoid anything which might give rise to unnecessary conflict. The day drew near and the Austrians thought that they were making insufficient progress; for one thing, they were at a disadvantage owing to the very low value of their money. They hoped that Germany would come with more zeal than ever to the rescue, and they hoped that something fatal would occur to Yugoslavia. So they asked the Inter-Allied Commissions to put it to their Governments that it would be advisable if the plebiscite were to be postponed for several months, say until May 1921. But it was reported that the French and British representatives declined to countenance the scheme. They may also have feared that if the period of canvassing were to be so long drawn out, the same passions would come to the surface as in the plebiscite in east and west Prussia, where in many places the Poles could not display their sympathies except at great personal risk. But in that particular plebiscite it must be noted that the Allies were very imprudent in confiding the maintenance of order to the rebaptized German Security Police, a body which was entirely in the hands of the reactionary clique. Yet the military precautions of zone "A" in Carinthia were not what they should have been, for when the Yugoslavs had lost the plebiscite an unrestrained horde of Austrian sympathizers, some of them from that zone and some from outside it, some of them civilians and some of them soldiers in mufti who made for certain places where supplies of weapons had been hidden, swarmed across the land and terrorized the Yugoslavs in such a fashion that a Yugoslav military force had to come in to protect them. "But how barbaric are these Yugoslavs," sneered their enemies, "for they refuse to recognize the result of the plebiscite." More than one diplomat in Belgrade was ordered to present himself at the Foreign Office and demand an answer why, etc. But the Yugoslavs had no intention of imitating d'Annunzio.

Those who were not in the zone at the time of the voting might well be astounded at the result, which was an Austrian victory by 22,025 votes against 15,278 for Yugoslavia. In view of the undoubted Yugoslav majority, it was felt that something more than active propaganda, before and during the election, had been brought to bear. For example, in the commune of Grabštajn (Grafenstein) the Germans are said to have inscribed on the electoral list 180 persons from Celovec and Styria who had no right to vote; they also asked that seventy strangers should be inscribed. On submitting these claims to the judgment of the district council the German leaders, even as the Yugoslavs, were required to initial each request; it is alleged that these initialled papers, which were attached to the claims, were left overnight in a room the key of which was in the keeping of the German secretary, Schwarz. He is charged with having removed the initialled papers from the Slovene claims and affixed them to the German claims. There was a large amount of more usual corruption. Thus it is known that twenty-eight Slovene servants at an important landowner's were unable to resist the material arguments and voted for the Germans. And if it is true that a number of people voted twice and even three times the Inter-Allied Commission fell short of its duties. It is said that the voting was so lax that if a stranger had been inscribed and did not turn up to vote, his legitimation was used by a native. Thus we are told of one Helena Rozenzoph, aged seventy-five, who was inscribed at Grabštajn. This woman had never existed; there had been a certain Barbara Rozenzoph who died in 1919, and her vote was used by Marjeta Hanzio, aged twenty-two years. The case was so flagrant that the Commission discovered it and the woman confessed to having acted on a note which she had received from the special Austrian gendarmerie force, the Heimatsdienst. The Commission seems to have been reluctant to take any steps against these frauds and it is not astonishing that the commune of Grabštajn registered 1290 votes for the Austrian Republic and only 380 for Yugoslavia, although in this commune of 3440 inhabitants there are no more than sixteen German families. A German majority was thus obtained in a province which Dr. Renner, the Austrian Chancellor, had acknowledged to be Slovene. It seems incredible that the Commission should have so completely broken down and the mystery may yet be cleared up, if as the Yugoslavia delegate requested, all the voting papers have been preserved.... But the Hrvat, the organ of the Narodny Club in Croatia (the decentralizing but strongly national party) blames Monsignor Korošec, the leader of the Slovene clericals, for the disastrous plebiscite result. He would have been better employed, it says, in organizing his people than in gadding about Croatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina and Dalmatia for the purpose of extending his party. He had boasted that the Slovenes were so well organized that they were perfectly confident as to the issue. It would seem, however, says the Hrvat, that an unexpectedly large proportion of them are partly or entirely Germanized. And this, more than the above-mentioned irregularities, may be chiefly responsible for Yugoslavia's loss. One must also remember that many a Slovene would shrink from garrison duty in Macedonia, while it would be very natural for the Carinthian farmer to look up at the mountains that separated him from Carniola and then to recollect that Celovec (Klagenfurt), the economic centre of the whole area, would be Austrian. Nevertheless if zone "A" had been smaller—and more completely Slav—it is probable that the population would have risen superior to the various doubts which assailed them. What we have said about the Slovenes who have become Germanized is borne out by the Koroski Slovenec, a newspaper which appears in Vienna and which, though since its formation has been essentially hostile to the Austrians, tells us that after the plebiscite the Slovenes have only suffered real oppression from their denationalized compatriots. Difficulties arose with regard to the closing of Slovene schools, but this was largely due to the fact that many of the Slovene schoolmasters fled to Yugoslavia.

(g) THE ITALIAN FRONTIER

A Yugoslav barrister from Pola had gone to a neighbouring village—this was in 1920—for the purpose of encouraging the natives, who were all Southern Slavs. He asked them, in the event of their part of Istria being allotted to the Italians, not to lose heart but to wait for the day when justice would come by her own. In the middle of his exhortations a jovial old farmer approached him and slapped him on the back. "Cheer up, young man!" he exclaimed. "What is it that you are afraid of?" ... The Slav population of Istria and Gorica-Gradišca, even as that of Dalmatia, has endured a great many things and is prepared to endure a great many more. Kindness would have gone a long way towards disarming them. If the Italians on the eastern Adriatic had been exponents of the Mazzini spirit rather than—which too often has been the case—of the direst Nationalist, then the Yugoslavs would have accepted—mournfully, no doubt, but faute de mieux—the frontier from the river Arša in Istria which President Wilson suggested. This would have been a compromise frontier, by which 400,000 Slovenes and Croats would fall to Italy and a very much smaller number of Italians would fall to Yugoslavia. It would have satisfied the great sensible mass of the Italian people, but unfortunately was rejected by Baron Sonnino and his myrmidons. Far more was claimed by him, and the succeeding Italian Governments have had to struggle with the passions he so recklessly aroused. They have been unable to persuade the country that with the Arša frontier they would be getting by no means a bad bargain. By the Treaty of Rapallo the Italians have obtained much more: the whole of Gorica-Gradišca, portions of Carniola, the whole of Istria and contiguity with Rieka (which is made a free town), the islands of Lussin, Cres and Unie, sovereignty over a strip of five miles which includes Zadar (and a few adjacent islands), finally the southern island of Lastovo and Pelagosa which lies in the middle of the Adriatic.

In November 1920 all the outside world was congratulating the Italians and the Yugoslavs on having, after many fruitless efforts of their statesmen, come to this agreement. The opinion was expressed that both of the contracting parties would henceforth be satisfied, since each of them was conscious that the other had accepted something less than his desires. It was noted that the Yugoslavs exhibited more generosity, as they gave up some half a million of their countrymen, while the Italians yielded in Dalmatia that to which they had no right. The Yugoslavs had, in the past two years, shown so much more forbearance than was usually expected of a vigorous young nation that the commentators for the most part fancied they would not waste any time in grieving over these inevitable sacrifices. It is freely said that if a liberal spirit is displayed by the Italians at the various points where they and Yugoslavia are in contact, both people will settle down, with no afterthoughts, to friendly and neighbourly relations. But it would be foolish to close our eyes to the fact that the position at Rieka and Zadar, not to speak of any other places, bristles with difficulties. At Rieka one hopes that the largest and wisest party, the Autonomists, will now come into their rights; no doubt a good many of those opportunist citizens who, at the time of the Italian occupation, developed into Italianissimi, after having previously been known as more or less platonic lovers of Italy, Hungary, or Croatia with ambitions chiefly centred on their native town, will presently assure you that in the Free State they are convinced Free Staters; but the local politicians have been living for so long in such a thoroughly oppressive atmosphere that most of those who have been prominent should for a season now retire. It will be difficult enough for this harassed port to settle down to business. As for the Zadar enclave, it is not easy to understand why an Italian majority in this little town should bring it under the Italian flag while the overwhelming Slav majorities of central and eastern Istria have been ignored. And with all the goodwill in the world the existence of this minute colony encircled by Yugoslav lands will scarcely make more easy the conduct of relations between Yugoslavia and Italy. It is naturally to the interest of both countries that misunderstandings and suspicions should be swept away. And from this point of view it is very doubtful whether the Italians were well advised in taking Zadar into their possession. Presumably the Government was forced to do so by the state of public feeling. They withstood this feeling with regard to the magnificent harbour of Vis, which even President Wilson suggested they should have, and contented themselves with the smaller Yugoslav island of Lastovo (Lagosta). The pity is that the Nationalists should have forced into their hands anything which may turn and sting them.

It may be thought that we are excessively pessimistic in pointing rather to the dangers which the Treaty places on the tapis than to the good sense of those who will deal with them. We do not say that the Italians would have permitted their Government to solve the Adriatic question in a safer and more philosophic manner; but we cannot look forward with that confidence we should have had if more sagacious counsels had prevailed.

An arrangement most agreeable to the bulk of the interested population would have been effected if two Free States, instead of one, had been created: the small one of Rieka, and a larger one embracing Triest and the western part of Istria. There would be in each of these two States a mixed population, who would think with a shudder of the time when the grass was growing on their quays. Italians and Slavs, prosperous as of old, would very cordially agree that the experiment of being included in Italy had been at any rate a commercial disaster. [D'Annunzio's administration was, of course, a mere camouflage. Without the support of the Italian Government, which paid his troops though calling them rebels, the poet-adventurer could scarcely have lasted for a day; and the swarm of officers, many of them worse adventurers than himself, would have deserted him. Nor would the population of Rieka have listened to his glowing periods if the Italian Government had not, under cover of the Red Cross, sent an adequate supply of food into the town.] Both Rieka and Triest were, therefore, living under practically the same conditions, separated from their natural hinterland, and knowing very well that as Italian towns their prospects were lamentable. It was significant that the Italian Government should after a time have studied the scheme of constructing a canal from Triest to the Save. Before the War one-third of the urban population (and all the surrounding country) was Yugoslav; and now, when so many Yugoslavs have departed and so many Italians have arrived, even now it is certain that in a plebiscite not 10 per cent. would vote for Italy—and this minority would be largely made up of those leccapiatini (the "plate-lickers") who were the humbler servants of Austria during the War and are now begging for Italian plates. When the offices of the Socialist newspaper Il Lavoratore—the Socialists are by far the most important party in Triest—were taken by storm and gutted, the American Consul, Mr. Joseph Haven, and the Paris correspondent of the New York Herald, Mr. Eyre, happened to be in the building. They afterwards said that the attack by those ultra-nationalist bands, the fascisti—very young men, demobilized junior officers and so forth—was entirely unprovoked. The carabinieri gazed indifferently at the scene. Such is life in Triest, where the labour movement is gaining in strength every day. Its old prosperity has departed—there is hardly any trade or water or gas, since most of the coal was consumed, by order of the Italian authorities, in making electric light for illuminations. These were intended to show the city's irrepressible enthusiasm at being incorporated in the kingdom of Italy. But the inhabitants know very well that being one of Italy's many ports is worse than being the only port of Austria; they know that the most direct railways to Austria pass through Yugoslav territory, that henceforward the Danube will be much more largely used by Austria, Czecho-Slovakia and Hungary (none of whom had a seaboard) and that Rieka will now be a more formidable rival than of old.... So, too, at Pola we find that a majority of the population do not wish their town to be retained in Italy; a number of Italian workmen fled from the idle shipbuilding yards and actually came in 1919 and 1920 with the Slovene refugees, their fellow-townsmen, to Ljubljana in search of employment. There are not sufficient orders to go round among such yards in Italy where, owing to the absence of coal and iron, this particular industry labours under great disadvantages. But if Rome considers that the retention of Pola is strategically essential, then in order to meet her wishes this town might be taken out of the Triest-Istrian Free State—maybe the Italians will be able to do something that will cause the citizens to cease regretting those good days of old when, as Austria's chief naval base, she flourished on the largesse of officers and men. But what can she do, and what could anybody do? Hundreds of houses are deserted; and for the year 1920 the owners of the theatre—which did not engage expensive actors but relied mainly on cinema—were faced with a deficit of 12,000 lire.

The Triest-Istrian Free State would approximately contain, without Pola, some 300,000 inhabitants, half Italian and half Yugoslav. The formation of this State would be less advantageous to the Yugoslavs, for most of the big landowners and the shop-keepers are Italians who live on the Yugoslav peasants; but Yugoslavia, for the sake of peace, would be glad to see the State come into existence. Eastern and central Istria, forming a part of Yugoslavia and lying between the two Free States, should extend to Porto di Bado, which would cause it to possess about 3,000 Italians and 280,000 Yugoslavs. If it were to be bounded by the Arša it would make the Italians in the Triest-Istrian State become a minority.

With respect to the indisputable Slav districts east of the Isonzo, i.e. the territory of Gorica-Gradišca and an appreciable part of Carniola, which have been adjudged to Italy and which long to be joined to the Yugoslav State, there are two possible solutions. (In passing we may observe that there is no country where the national frontier is more clearly indicated. The linguistic frontier is so strictly defined that the peasant on one side of it does not speak Italian and his neighbour on the other side does not understand the Slovene tongue. Nevertheless, Signor Colajanni, the venerable leader of the Italian Republicans, took up an undemocratic point of view and declined to admit the argument of the superiority of numbers, when he alluded to this frontier in a speech to the Republican Congress at Naples. Waving numbers aside, he preferred to appeal to history and culture, though he should have known that the mass of the Slovene people is much better educated than the Italian peasant.) The true ethnographical boundary would be the Isonzo—not many Yugoslavs live to the west and not many Italians to the east of that river. Only in the town of Gorica do we find Italians. In 1910 at the census the Italian municipal authorities attempted to show that their town was almost entirely Italian; at a subsequent census the Austrians found that the returns had been largely falsified, and that in reality Gorica contained 14,000 Italians and 12,000 Slovenes, while it is common knowledge that if you go 500 yards from the town you meet nothing but Slovenes. The prosperity of Gorica was mostly based on the export of fruit and vegetables from the Slovene countryside. In 1898 the Slovenes awakened, formed societies, started in business on a large scale and boycotted the Italian merchants, who found themselves obliged to learn the Slovene language. Suppose that, for the sake of meeting the wishes of the Italian Nationalists, one half of the town were given to Italy, then that portion would be faced with ruin. It would, therefore, be advisable that the whole town should remain with its hinterland, and that Italy and Yugoslavia should be divided from each other by the Isonzo. But if this solution is impossible, then a large district east of the Isonzo should be entirely and permanently neutralized, which would not endanger the security of either State. Very different in character is the line Triglav-Idria-Sneznik, which the Italians hold ostensibly as a means of defence, but which is an offensive line against Yugoslavia, and primarily against Ljubljana and Karlovac.

No doubt as the Italians in the eastern Adriatic have obtained a regular position by the Treaty of Rapallo they will henceforth do their best to win the love of their new subjects. They will disavow such officers as that one on the sandy isle of Unie who accused the Slav priest of propaganda, and in fact, as we have mentioned elsewhere, expelled him for the reason that inside his church, where they had been for many years, stood monuments of the two Slav apostles, SS. Cyril and Methodus. St. Methodus was the wise administrator of these two—but even if he takes the rulers of the eastern Adriatic under his particular protection one must be prepared for them to fail in smothering, by their enlightened rule, the discontent which in the last three years has grown among the Yugoslavs to such acute proportions. It began, as we have noted, under the aegis of Baron Sonnino; the old neighbour, Austria-Hungary, had been Italy's hereditary foe, and the Baron's school could not bring itself to regard the new neighbours in a friendly light, although their house was so much less populated than that of their predecessors, not to mention that of the Italians themselves.

There have been times during the last three years when a war between Italy and Yugoslavia seemed scarcely avoidable—the natives of the districts most concerned were looking forward to it with eagerness. At a Yugoslav assembly held in Triest in the summer of 1919 the other delegates were electrified by two priests from Istria who declared that their people were straining at the leash, anxious for the word to snatch up their weapons. (Many of these weapons, by the way, were of Italian origin, as there had been no great difficulty in purchasing them from the more pacific or the more Socialistic Italian soldiers; the usual price was ten lire for a rifle and a hundred rounds.) If there should come about a war between Italy and Yugoslavia, then it is to be supposed that the Yugoslavs will afterwards take as their western frontier the old frontier of Austria (except for the Friuli district, south of Cormons, which they do not covet, since they look upon this ancient race as Italian.)

By signing the Treaty of Rapallo the Yugoslav Government has shown that it is ready to go to very great lengths in order to establish, as securely as may be, an era of peace. It would be just as creditable on the part of the Italians if they will consent to Istria being partitioned in the way we have suggested, for they have been wrongly taught to think themselves entitled to this country, and to believe that the inhabitants, as a whole, are glad to be Italian subjects. "You may suppose we are unpatriotic," the Austrian railway officials of Italian nationality used to say, "but as Austria gives much better pay than we should receive from Italy, we prefer that this part of the world should be Austrian."

The relations between Italy and Yugoslavia have been treated at some length, for it would require but little to bring a gathering of storm-clouds to the sky. One even hears of Roman Catholics in Istria and elsewhere abjuring their Church and—for the national cause—adopting the Serbian Orthodox faith. Twenty years ago it happened that two Istrian villages, Ricmanje and Log, went over to the Uniate and thence to the Orthodox Church. This was on account of a quarrel with the Bishop of Triest, who wanted, against the wishes of the people, to remove their priest, Dr. Pojar. But now we have priests in the provinces given to Italy who are openly calling on their flock to go over with them to their Orthodox brothers; and this is a movement which, it is thought, will merely be postponed by the introduction of the Slav liturgy. To take a single sermon out of many, we may mention one which in the summer of 1920 was preached in a church of the Vipava valley. The clergyman, after lamenting that the chief dignitaries of the Roman Catholic Church are Italians, gave it as his opinion that there was nothing to choose in point of goodness between that particular Church and the Orthodox Church. "And," said an old peasant who came to Triest with the story of what had happened, "never in my life did I hear so fine a sermon and one that did me so much good."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 72: The Italians had originally landed a "hygienic mission" at Valona early in the European War, and this of course developed into something else. That ingenuous propagandist, Mr. H. E. Goad, tells us (in the Fortnightly Review of May 1922) that while Nature had made the innumerable deep-water harbours on the eastern coast of the Adriatic practically immune from Italy's attack, a landing or raid from one of them at Ancona, Bari or Barletta would be a vital blow at Italy, severing vital communications. He therefore justifies Italy's landing at Valona in that it was a purely defensive step, made to ensure that its harbour should not be used against her. He may hold that the seizure of one town is better than the seizure of none, but from the strategic and political point of view it would seem that Mr. Goad is an injudicious advocate.]

[Footnote 73: Albaniens Zukunft. Munich, 1916.]

[Footnote 74: La Sera, August 6, 1920.]

[Footnote 75: Giornale delle Puglie, September 6-7, 1920.]

[Footnote 76: The delegates of the League of Nations were told, at the beginning of 1922, by the authorities in southern Albania that it was iniquitous to believe that they would employ this kind of punishment for political refugees. Did they not advertise an amnesty to all those who returned within forty-five days? And in what newspaper, they indignantly asked—in what newspaper had they published the slightest threat of arson?]

[Footnote 77: In the winter of 1921 this gentleman was expelled from his country.]

[Footnote 78: Albanesische Studien. Jena, 1854.]

[Footnote 79: Albanien und die Albanesen.]

[Footnote 80: But this is less rigorously upheld in the towns if it is a question of their honour or of cash. When, to give an example, Scutari was occupied by the Montenegrins at the beginning of the Great War, a Catholic Albanian merchant came to a Montenegrin lawyer and asked him to institute proceedings against another merchant who had gravely and publicly insulted him. The lawyer drew up the complaint, for which he charged the small sum of 20 perpers (= francs), but although his client was a wealthy man this fee appalled him; he resolved to take no further steps. In general, the Scutarenes prefer to suffer imprisonment rather than part with any money. And the willingness of the Albanians not to look a gift-horse in the mouth could often be observed at Podgorica between the years 1909 and 1912, when Nicholas of Montenegro would occasionally appear in the market-place with a supply of caps and other articles for the Albanians. These he would distribute, having first exclaimed: "Kačak Karadak Kralj Nikola barabar!" (that is to say, "The Albanian and the Montenegrin are equal in the eyes of King Nicholas!"). Kačak is a word meaning a brigand, an outlaw; the Montenegrins apply it to their neighbours, and these latter, throwing their new caps in the air and cheering for Nikita, did not mind what he called them.]

[Footnote 81: Turkey in Europe. London, 1900.]

[Footnote 82: Ein Vorstoss in die Nordalbanischen Alpen. Vienna, 1905.]

[Footnote 83: Italy in the Balkans at this Hour. Naples, 1913.]

[Footnote 84: L'Albanie Independente, by Dukagjin-Zadeh Basri Bey. Paris, 1920.]

[Footnote 85: Cf. the New Statesman, February 5, 1921.]

[Footnote 86: When the Serbian troops arrived at Priština in the Balkan War they discovered among the inhabitants of that place a man who had not left his house for some fourteen years. We are told (in The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, etc., vol. v. London, 1921) of my Lord Eyre of Eyrescourt in County Galway "that not one of the windows of his castle was made to open, but luckily he had no liking for fresh air." Yet probably his lordship's countenance had not the pallor of the man of Priština, because "from an early dinner to the hour of rest he never left his chair, nor did the claret ever quit the table."]

[Footnote 87: When this account of the incident was published in my small book, A Difficult Frontier, it caused a reviewer, one I. M., in The Near East to observe, that I "can be jubilant when a Montenegrin in Yugoslav pay insults a British officer, Captain Brodie." Since the Editor permits such hopeless nonsense to appear in his columns one may be excused, I think, for not taking The Near East very seriously. It is not worth while informing them how General Phillips of Scutari dealt with Captain Brodie.]

[Footnote 88: Referring in the Nation and Athenaeum to Sir Charles's latest work, Hinduism and Buddhism (3 vols.), Mr. Edwyn Bevan says that "for a lonely student, who had done nothing in his life but study, the book would have been a sufficiently remarkable achievement. That a man who has been an active public servant and held high and responsible offices should have found time for the studies which this book presupposes is marvellous. It is a masterly survey.... There can be few men who have Sir Charles's gift of linguistic accomplishments, who can not only read Sanskrit and Pali, but know enough of the Dravidian languages of Southern India to check statements by reference to the original writings, and add to this a knowledge of Chinese and Tibetan."]

[Footnote 89: Cf. pp. 72-73, Vol. I.]

[Footnote 90: Cf. Manchester Guardian, February 28, 1919.]

[Footnote 91: Cf. A Political Escapade: The Story of Fiume and D'Annunzio, by J. N. Macdonald, O.S.B. London, 1921.]

[Footnote 92: Cf. Tribune de Geneve, October 13, 1921.]

[Footnote 93: Those who are curious as to the gentleman's antecedents may like to refer to my book, Under the Acroceraunian Mountains.]

[Footnote 94: Cf. La Suisse (of Geneva), October 13, 1921.]

[Footnote 95: Cf. Journal des Debats, October 15, 1921.]

[Footnote 96: This would be about 18,000 lb. avoirdupois.]

[Footnote 97: Cf. p. 283, Vol. II.]

[Footnote 98: Cf. Morning Post of December 14, 1921.]

[Footnote 99: Cf. Le Temps, November 11, 1921.]

[Footnote 100: "Who is this anonymous idiot?... He really ought to have known better than that," says a reviewer in The Near East. I quite agree. It is pleasant now and then to be able to agree with a paper which is so one-sided as to admit pro-Nikita and anti-Serbian diatribes by Mr. Devine, but which refuses to insert a letter on the other side. "Let us not mix ourselves up in their domestic affairs," said the Editor to me after an hour's conversation. And though it is a matter of no importance, I may mention that he employs a reviewer who, referring to the map in my book, A Difficult Frontier (Yugoslavs and Albanians)—a map which is most conspicuously printed opposite the title-page—observes that it "is hidden in one unostentatious page, which at first sight escapes the reader's attention altogether."]

[Footnote 101: In the Samouprava of November 12 the whole case was discussed with his usual lucidity by Dr. Lazar Marković, one of the ablest and most philosophic men in Yugoslavia. This ex-Professor of Law is now the Minister of Justice, and it is to be hoped that he will eventually succeed in the place of Pašić.]

[Footnote 102: Those who like to hold the Serbs up to contumely have not a very strong case when they denounce them for now being on friendly terms with the Christian Mirditi, whereas they used to be the friends of Essad Pasha; this personage was at that time the man whose national Albanian policy had the greatest chance of success. He was the one man who then appeared capable of establishing a State in which Christians and Moslems would be fairly represented. But now too many of the Moslem—and not only they—have adopted an Italophil attitude which is sadly anti-national.]

[Footnote 103: A later phase was for the Government to recognize that what Albania must have is the friendship of Yugoslavia, so that the eyes of the most powerful Ministers were turned from Rome to Belgrade. Thereupon the Italians, loth to lose their footing in the country, gave their patronage to the anti-Governmental parties. It was pleasant to hear in the summer of 1922 that when the boundary commissioners had left a lamentable neutral zone between the two countries the Albanian Government suggested to the very willing Government of Yugoslavia that they should co-operate in cleansing that zone of its brigand population.]

[Footnote 104: December 16, 1921.]

[Footnote 105: According to the Geographical-Statistical Atlas recently published by the German Professor Hickmann the average loss among the belligerent countries, in killed, wounded and through diminution of the birth-rate, was 6.5 per cent. At one end of the list of suffering nations is the United States with a percentage of 0.4, Great Britain with 3.7, and Belgium with 4.7. Roumania, Italy, Bulgaria and Turkey are all between 6 and 6.5 per cent. France has a percentage of 8.5, Russia has 9, Germany 9.3 and Austria 11. Above them all comes Serbia with the appalling percentage of 23.]

[Footnote 106: November 24, 1921.]

[Footnote 107: Cf. "Geographie Humaine de la France" in the Histoire de la Nation Francaise. Paris, 1920.]

[Footnote 108: Cf. L'histoire illustree de la guerre de 1914.]

[Footnote 109: L'Albanie en 1921. Paris, 1922.]

[Footnote 110: Under the Acroceraunian Mountains.]

[Footnote 111: M. Gabriel Louis Jaray. Cf. his Les Albanais (Paris, 1920) and his other writings on the Albanians.]

[Footnote 112: Cf. A History of the Peace Conference of Paris. Edited by H. W. V. Temperley, vols. iv. and v. London, 1921.]

[Footnote 113: Elias Regnault, Histoire politique et sociale des Principautes Danubiennes. Paris, 1885.]

[Footnote 114: The more advanced Roumanians of the plain also apply this term to their countrymen who live among the Roumanian mountains or, in Serbia, amid the heights of Požarevac and Kraina. It signifies a stupid fellow, one from the wilderness.]

[Footnote 115: February 13, 1919.]



IX

CONCLUSION: A FEW NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS

THE SLOVENES AND THE SERBS—THE MONTENEGRINS AND THE SERBS—THE CROATS AND THE SERBS—SERB AND BULGAR.

THE SLOVENES AND THE SERBS

Those who, for some reason or other, do not love the Yugoslavs will have said to themselves, before taking up this book, that they would certainly supply that searching criticism of this people which the author would omit. They knew it was unlikely that a man would write at such excessive length about the Southern Slavs if he had not a weakness for them, and if he predicted for their State the virtue of cohesion or more than very moderate tranquillity, his prejudice would have to be discounted. "The Yugoslavs," said an Italian lady to me in London, and her beautiful lips looked as if they could scarcely bring themselves to pronounce the name, "the Yugoslavs," she said, "are very wild and black." If I have given the impression in this book that they are white, my fault will be much greater than the lady's, since I am not quite a stranger to them. Slovenes, Croats, Serbs and Bulgars—they have good and evil qualities so different that one must take them separately, and perhaps it will be more instructive to compare them with each other. The Slovenes need not detain us; they are a small people occupying a surprisingly large area; if they were less well organized they would have been long ago swallowed up. They shine as workers in the field and mine and forest much more than as military men. They have never been hereditary soldiers, like so many of the Croats, and it is perhaps this want of confidence in their own military prowess which has caused them to take measures that are sometimes too severe against the Austrians who are under them. The Bosnian Moslems assert that, as all their links with Turkey are now broken, they are the best Yugoslavs. But the Slovenes are also the best Yugoslavs, because they recognize that in Yugoslavia is their sole salvation. Some of us may regret that their tenacity so far outstrips their idealism. They are a careful people, as may be seen from Order No. 17024 which was issued, on December 4, 1920, by the Prefecture of Ljutomir. Referring to sequestered property, it enjoined that the Austrian owner should be allowed so much that he could live on it, but not so much as to enable him to be extravagant. They are also a relatively well-educated people; according to official statistics of 1910, 85.34 per cent. of the Slovene population know how to read and write, while their neighbours to the east, the Magyars, can only reckon 62 per cent. and the Italians of pre-war Italy, 62.4 per cent. The most backward part of the Slovene race, those of Istria, have 46.6 per cent. of illiterates, while there are Italian provinces where the illiterates amount even to 85 per cent. Rome itself counts 65 per cent.[116]

THE MONTENEGRINS AND THE SERBS

It will be profitable to compare the Montenegrins with the Serbs, because in our impatience with those persons who would keep them separate we may have seemed to imply that we believe them identical. The Serbs who maintained themselves in those mountains developed certain characteristics which differentiate them from their brothers. The Serb of the old kingdom walks, the Serb of the mountain struts. The magnificent Serbian warrior of the kingdom is so disciplined that although a Field-Marshal will sit down openly in a cafe and drink wine with some old comrade who is in the ranks, yet when the soldier is on duty his obedience is perfect. But if the Montenegrin private thinks that his officer has rebuked him unjustly, he will not hesitate to kill him. The Serb has a great respect for the national heroes, while every Montenegrin (for the sake of brevity we will use this term instead of "Serb of Montenegro," and imply, when using the word Serb, a Serb of the old kingdom)—as we have said, a Serb respects the national heroes, while every Montenegrin has a knowledge of his own ancestors for at least a hundred years. He is a chivalrous person who wishes to be treated as at least your equal. It was the Serbs' disregard of this sentiment which now and then gave umbrage to those Montenegrins who had expected that their union with the Serbs would cause an immediate return of the golden age. This was almost as offensive to the Montenegrins as the request that they would now contribute towards the support of the army. They had always left this to the Tzar—"We and the Russians," they used to say, "are 150 millions." Not all the Montenegrins have managed to emancipate themselves from the thraldom of the clan. An amusing example of this was a major at Peć who belonged to the great Vasojević family. He gave two of us a large lorry, which was the only car he had, and advised us to start very early and to take no one with us, except a guard, as the road to Mitrovica was in a soft condition. We started off with about twenty passengers, but only one of them, a Turk, had any luggage to speak of; and after we had gone a good part of the way we were held up at a military post. A Montenegrin captain, also a member of the Vasojević, had overslept himself and ordered us by telephone to return for him. The Serbian lieutenant—who had risen from the ranks—asked at once if that order would come in writing, and when he received a negative answer he cut off the communication and wished us a happy journey. The Montenegrins also differ from the Serbs in their cultivation of the arts. They have no liking for songs of love, but say that men should only listen to the guslar and to hero-songs. They are severer and more dignified than the Serbs, and it will be some time before the average Montenegrin throws back his head in a railway carriage and rolls out a joyous song, as I once heard a Serb do in the Banat, whereupon another Serb in the far corner—they obviously had never met—joined in the song with great heartiness. The Montenegrin says that the Serb chatters like a gipsy (though we must not forget that, as Miss Durham remarked,[117] he is hurt if things Serbian are criticized by an outsider); he has been told that the Englishman is grave, like himself, and therefore he appreciates him from afar. But not many Englishmen (or Serbs) would care to indulge, like the Montenegrins, in the ceaseless recapitulation of time-honoured exploits. The younger folk are not so faithful to these ancient stories, but it is in Montenegro that performers on the one-stringed, monotonous guslar can most easily find an audience. The Serbs of the kingdom have become more eclectic in musical matters, though even with them the popular taste is in favour of the man who snores, on the grounds that he is hearty and robust. In so far as foreign influence is concerned, the Montenegrin has been to some extent affected by Italian culture, while that of Greece and Germany has acted on the Serb. But the Great War had an equally unfortunate influence on both of them. One must, however, mention that long before the War, and owing partly to Albanian influence, partly to their own struggle for existence and partly to other causes, the Montenegrins had shown themselves defective in straightforwardness. Undoubtedly they had deteriorated under the example of Nikita, but this unfortunate trait can also be discerned between the lines of the great poem, the "Gorski Venac," written in the first half of the nineteenth century. There used to be a certain amount of what we call theft in Montenegro, but the natives of that country, as of Albania, cherished rather communistic ideas; it seemed to them that they had a sort of right to that which another possessed, particularly if he was a near relative. After the War the Montenegrin was so much impoverished that he stole more freely, and the Serb, whose hands had hitherto been remarkably clean, took to the same habits and often in a very amateur fashion. Thus in a Macedonian village where a British army store had been rifled, the officers turned to the local priest, who was indignant with his people and conducted the officers into every house. Nothing was discovered, and the priest proposed that his own house should be searched. He was told that this was unnecessary, but he insisted; and when his careless wife led the way up a ladder into the loft a British officer perceived at any rate one pair of khaki breeches. The patients of the Scottish Women's Hospital at Belgrade were so unpractised in the art of stealing that one of them—a typical case—returned one day to have her leg attended to, and in raising her skirt revealed on the petticoat, which had once been a tablecloth, a large "S.W.H." These felonious ways are in contrast with the usual Serb candour. One afternoon in Belgrade I was searching for a small street in a district which I had not visited before. When at last, after many inquiries, I came to within fifty yards of it I found a policeman—but it is only fair to say that the majority of the force consisted at this time of soldiers recently disbanded. When I asked him where the street might be, the good man thought a while and then, throwing back his open hand and giving up the problem in despair, said, "My God, I know not."

The wave of crime has manifested itself differently among the Serbs and the Montenegrins, in that the latter have been more primitive and have consummated their plundering by assassination—and this in a country where between 1895 and 1913 only two men were murdered for their money. In Serbia the people, even in the terrible distress after the War, did not go to such lengths. During the first half-year, the only two cases of unnatural death in the whole district of Čačak, where I spent a couple of months, were both of them suicides, an old man hanging himself on account of the death of his last remaining soldier son, and an officer's wife, who had been too friendly to an Austrian, throwing herself into a well on her husband's return. A certain village of the same district is an instance of the frequency of all those minor peccadilloes, such as drunkenness and rowdiness and so forth, which the Serbs permit themselves. There is a law which lays it down that the mayor must be a native and must be a man who never has been lodged in gaol. But that unhappy village in the Čačak region is unable to produce a single adult man with such a record.... If the Serb of the old kingdom is a more easy-going individual than his brother of the mountains it is quite erroneous to think that they dislike each other or have not resolved to come together.

THE CROATS AND THE SERBS

Some of Yugoslavia's neighbours were anxious, during the months which followed the War, that we should learn how Serb and Croat were continually at each other's throat. The dissensions between the two branches of the Yugoslav family would have been much more serious and more prolonged if their neighbours had paid less attention to them. It is true that "our Serbian customs," in the words of Jaša Tomić, "come from the village, while those of the Croats come from the nobles." The humbler Croat, one may say, was an employee in a big store, while the Serb was a small trader. The Croat would naturally like to introduce the big-store system into Yugoslavia, but this the Serb does not understand. He has a greater sense of responsibility and is more careful with regard to the expenses. To the Croat, in the old Empire, it was immaterial whether the officials were more or less costly. The bill was paid by Austria, who was the foe. For some time the Croat found himself forgetting that he was in Yugoslavia. When Cardinal Bourne came to Zagreb in the spring of 1919 and the town-hall was decorated with the British, Croatian, Serbian, Slovene and the town flag, some one asked the mayor why the State flag had been omitted. He was horrified. "The State flag!" he cried. Then it dawned upon him.... Numbers of Croats have belonged to the governing class and—impelled by the Catholic religion—have displayed more devotion to the arts than to the freedom of their country. On the other hand the Serbs, a race of practical peasants, have a highly developed national consciousness. This they owe partly to their inborn political gifts and largely to their Church, for the Orthodox religion—one may say, I think, without injustice—has more frequently shown itself, so closely is it connected with the idea of the State, to be rather of this world than of another. One should say the Orthodox religion as it flourishes in the Balkans, for when the Russian General Bobrikoff, who was attached to the person of King Milan, came back with him to Belgrade after the Peace of San Stefano, he was scandalized to see that religion had no greater share in the national rejoicings. "Accustomed as I was in my own country," he said, "to see nothing done without prayers and the blessing of the Church, I was indeed astounded to observe that the priests played the part of officials even in the cathedral, and often were altogether absent." This reminds one of von Baernreiter, who wished to learn the Serbian language, so that he would be more eligible for the governorship of Bosnia. He asked his teacher at Vienna when one could hear sermons in the Serbian church, and was informed that these occurred but twice a year and that on those occasions everybody left the church. The Serb and the Bulgar have come to neglect our distinctions between that which is spiritual and that which is temporal; their religion is, in consequence of their history, so inherent a part of the nation's life that in losing it one would almost cease to be a Serb or a Bulgar. Their Church is as national as that of the Armenians.[118] This may not be an ideal state of things, but it prevailed in Spain under the Moorish oppression and in the France of Jeanne d'Arc. During the crisis of the Great War the churches in the West were everywhere national; and in Serbia it was calculated that 60 per cent. of the sermons had a pronounced national colouring....

Now with these differences between the Croat and the Serb, does it not seem strange that the vast majority of them are for union, with a part of this majority in favour of a reasonable decentralization? But if we investigate the motives of the Serbs and Croats who would thwart this union, we will see that they have nothing of that faith which, after all these centuries, has moved the Yugoslav multitude. Some of the Serbs wish to keep aloof on the ground that Serbia in the last hundred years has borne the brunt of the battle—and this, whether they were or were not faced with a more difficult situation, is acknowledged by most of the Croats, who for that reason would never dream of wishing the more modern Zagreb to supplant Belgrade. Those few Croats who are not for Yugoslavia are moved by ecclesiastical prejudice or by their longing for the privileges which the Habsburgs granted them. But those who, for various reasons, criticize the central Government are by no means necessarily in favour of setting up a separate one. Whatever the impetuous Radić may have said, he is out for Yugoslavia. Still one cannot be astonished that he was sometimes misunderstood. The Zagreb students who, towards the end of 1918, came to Svetozar Pribičević with the request that he would let them kill the demagogue, were for expressing in this way what Dr. Dušan Popović, the well-known deputy, expressed in another. It was at the Zagreb Provincial Parliament that he exclaimed, in the summer of 1918, that "This idea will be victorious and therefore I say publicly, in the presence of the whole people, that I am a Croat, a Serb and a Slovene, or, if you prefer it, none of them but merely a Yugoslav." In 1914 when Stambouluesky, the future Prime Minister of Bulgaria, was arrested and accused of Serbophilism, he declared: "I am neither Bulgar or Serb; I am a Yugoslav!" ... For at least a generation Zagreb will remain particularist, zealously preserving the differences—personal, social and religious—which distinguish her people from the dominant Serbs. The Croat officers who burned with shame at the Archduke's murder on Bosnian soil, the Croat regiments that in 1915 marched into Belgrade with bands playing and their colours flying, the Croat officials whose bread and salt came from the Habsburgs in administering Yugoslav countries during the War—all these will not forget a long, deep-rooted and honourable tradition. But Zagreb is now even as Munich was in 1866; after having been the Rome of the Yugoslav movement, the seat of its philosophy and the centre of its politics, the Croat capital has now an atmosphere of sad futility, for Belgrade is the beacon of the Yugoslav world. While comparing Zagreb with Rome one must add that she had also the misfortune to resemble Rome of the decadence—a good deal of outer polish was imparted by the Austrians, at the expense of their victims' backbone. The five centuries of Turkish domination had no such demoralizing influence upon the Serbs, especially not in the country places. In the opinion of a very close observer,[119] whom I quote, there is nothing that so thoroughly displays the dominance of Belgrade as the agrarian problem. The projected reforms, which have been based on the principle that no one should own more land than he can cultivate with the aid of his family, would dispossess large numbers of big landowners in Croatia and still larger numbers of men with moderate holdings, whose compensation would be "determined hereafter." The application of these reforms has been delayed for various reasons, but nowhere at any time has it been suggested that Croatia might reject them. In the old kingdom of Serbia, with much the greater part of the land in peasant possession, it may be said that there is no agrarian problem.... Those enemies of Yugoslavia, by the way, who have hoped that the particularism of Croatia would be something altogether different from what it is, should have mingled with the crowd at Zagreb on the evening of Prince Alexander's arrival in July 1920. The Prince interrupted his dinner, came out on to the balcony and made a speech. "Draga moja bratjo Hrvati," he said—"Croatians, my dear brothers." Not for a thousand years had a ruler of Croatia addressed his people in their own tongue. One immense roar of delight broke, as the Morning Post's special correspondent tells us, from the assembled multitude; men fell on each other's necks, laughed, wept and kissed each other.... Such manifestations must not lead us to believe that all the internal problems of the young State are settled. Croatia (as also Slovenia) is jealous of her separate identity, suspicious to some extent of Serbia, her prestige and projects; she has no intention of allowing herself, after the hard fight against Magyarization, to be "Balkanized." But one thing was made clear by the Prince's visit: there can be no word or thought of separation.

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We have spoken of the disaffection prevalent among the Croats, and on this the world has fixed its eyes, because of the large number of Croat deputies who have hitherto declined to come to Belgrade. Nevertheless there is a more general and more grievous discontent in Yugoslavia, since, after all, the Croats' attitude is of a temporary character—for it is probable that after the next general election their peculiar upbringing will not be so potent in determining their sentiments towards the State. More and more will they be ready to make common cause with Serbs and Slovenes; and their criticisms, which are now so negative, will be of a more useful kind. (They will recognize, for example, that if it costs 3000 dinars to open an inn in Serbia they were not justified in protesting when the fee in Croatia was raised from 5 crowns to 5 dinars.) That Yugoslavia gives ground for criticism no one, least of all her well-wishers, deny. And those who pray that she will prosper do so for the reason that the scattered Southern Slavs have for the first time now been able—most of them at any rate—to link their arms together; and we hope that with high qualities outweighing their defects the Southern Slavs will permanently take their place among the nations. But this will not be brought about unless those ailments which they suffer from are now confronted. Serbs themselves are often saying that their little Serbia was better than this fine new country which is thrice as large. She had fewer problems, she had fewer parties, and if people were corrupt they were so on a smaller scale. Traditions which are deprecatingly called Balkan, but which were at that time suited to a Balkan country, should not be allowed to spread across a country which is so much more than Balkan. Merit does not everywhere in this imperfect world advance you automatically, but an effort is required in Yugoslavia to resist the calls of friendship in appointing men to offices. The army of officials is too numerous; yet many of them are so badly paid that even if a great reformer could reduce by half their numbers he would be inclined to lay no hand upon the total sum they now enjoy. But this necessity of cleansing the public services is not peculiar to Yugoslavia. The politicians must have courage to lay heavier taxes on the peasants: the strange phenomenon is seen of peasants who assert that they are quite prepared for this, and on the other hand of politicians who are frightened lest it lose them many votes. The peasants generally are so prosperous that some, for instance, whom I know of near Kragujevac, men occupied in growing cereals, find that the fowls which they keep rather as a hobby do not have to lay them golden eggs in order to pay all the taxes. In that region it is usual nowadays for peasants not to count their bank-notes, but to weigh them; recently a man disposed of certain fields for his own weight in notes of ten dinars. The peasants are not only dissatisfied with the two chief parties, the Radicals and the Democrats, for not taxing them sufficiently—so that at the next general election they may give a good deal more support than hitherto to their own Peasants' party—but they complain that their interests are neglected although, as we have seen, the lawyers and other townsfolk of the Radical and Democrat parties are so anxious with respect to peasants' votes.

The difficult position of the Yugoslavs—observe how in the last year their exchange has fallen—is due in part to the deplorable activities of other peoples (vast amounts have had to be imported for reconstruction purposes, Rieka has been practically unavailable as a port, and conditions have been such that the Yugoslavs have had to keep a large army mobilized), partly their position is due to measures ill-advised but which they were compelled to take (such as their system of Agrarian Reform), partly to political inexperience and partly to their lack of organizing powers. Let us hope that from now onwards Yugoslavia will have to arm herself less heavily against the slings and arrows of the world, and that she will be able therefore to become a more proficient swimmer in this sea of troubles.

SERB AND BULGAR

A map of the Balkan migrations, with its curved lines leading almost everywhere, is a bewildering spectacle; but if we study the main clusters of lines we shall see that the people whose movements they chronicle have frequently preserved, in a remarkable fashion, certain common characteristics: thus a stream flowed from the south-west towards Valjevo in Serbia, and it is interesting to notice how the prominent men of that region, whose ancestors came from somewhere between Montenegro and the old frontiers of Serbia, have all of them certain characteristics—a talent for foreign languages, a subtlety of reasoning, originality but insufficient observation, and clever but fallacious minds. Similarly in the Bulgar there are qualities which even now can be ascribed to the Mongol blood. The Bulgar is more stolid than the Serb; he is less given to sympathy and on that account can be cruel. The Bulgar is benevolent because he is urged by kindliness, whereas the more impressionable Serb is under the influence both of sentiment, sentimentality and sympathy. These differences of temperament—and there are others, more or less distinguishable—do not seem to Balkan thinkers any reason why the two should keep apart. And a couple of months after the Great War, during which the Bulgars, as their best friends must acknowledge, were far from irreproachable in occupied Serbia—partly this was due to the vast number of new posts for which they had no suitable men—a few months afterwards a Bulgarian engineer was placidly working among the Serbs at Čačak railway station, wearing his own uniform. And a Serbian butcher who emigrated to Bulgaria settled down at Ferdinand just before the War and has lived there unmolested up to this day, and that in spite of his not being very highly esteemed—for, as the police president told me, he had married a woman with more wealth than good fame; the president had been among her lovers.... One would not suppose that the contrasting public morality of the two countries will keep them apart. It is easy enough for us to argue that this morality is on a pretty low level, because a Bulgarian War Minister saw fit to sue, under a nom de guerre, a French armament firm which omitted to send him the stipulated commission; because another Minister, incarcerated on account of felony, could be liberated by the grace of Tzar Ferdinand and become Premier; because a Serbian Minister used to buy himself corner-houses, while his Bulgarian colleagues seem to own most of the houses in Sofia. There was a minor Serbian official over against whom I took my meals for about a month; one of his ways was to produce a pocket-knife and cut his bread with it. Certain other parts of his ritual did not appeal to me, but who knows whether I did not disgust him by breaking my bread with my fingers? And who knows what sentiments were awakened some years ago at the Orthodox monastery of Gromirija, in Croatia, when a foreign guest proposed to wash himself in water, though by the joyous custom of that house there was no other liquid on the premises but wine? If there is in both countries, in Serbia and Bulgaria, a movement against the cynicism which does not clothe its corruption with a decent Western drapery, that is something; if there is a further movement in the direction of probity, that is something more. And, whatever some Serbs may tell you, it is undeniable that honesty has made important strides in the public life of that kingdom, even without having added to the Statute Book those rigorous proposals of the newly-formed Peasants' party, one of which would punish a peculating official with death. It is, however, apparent that this party has not arrived at a sense of discretion, for it wants to terminate the practice of allowing pensions to officials, so that each man is obliged to make his own provision for old age. Bulgaria, the younger country, has made a proportionate progress; there is trustworthy German evidence to the effect that the corrupt Radoslavoff Government was despised by the people, not in the hour of disaster but in 1916, when the Bulgarian soldiers changed the words of an anti-Serb song and instead of "Our old allies are brigands" proclaimed that "the Liberals are brigands." This German, Dr. Helmut von den Steinen, the correspondent of the Nordeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (in which he was bound to speak favourably of Radoslavoff) used to deliver propaganda lectures in the Bulgarian language at Sofia during the War. He was very well acquainted with Bulgarian affairs and being summoned to Berlin at the end of 1917 he made a speech[120] in camera to a committee of German savants and artists. In the course of this he lamented that his country had attached herself to Radoslavoff, who, said he, was hated and would at the next elections be swept away.

As one must repeat ad nauseam, the gulf between Serb and Bulgar has not been caused by an extreme divergence of their private or their public morals, academically considered, but by the various incidents which in the eyes of each of them testified to the other's depravity. And at the bottom of it all was Macedonia—Macedonia which now, being wisely administered, will be the foundation-stone of Yugoslavia.

At the end of his book, Balkan Problems and European Peace, Mr. Noel Buxton agrees that such a Yugoslav Federation has become a practical possibility. But his two alternative proposals with respect to what should meanwhile be the fate of Macedonia would indefinitely postpone that Federation. We have already dealt with the proposal of autonomy, put forward also by Mr. Leland Buxton. As for what Mr. Noel Buxton calls the ideal solution—"a plebiscite conducted by an impartial international commission over the whole of the historical province of Macedonia"—this is aiming no higher than at a perpetuation of the two distinct countries, Serbia and Bulgaria. We should probably have had more plebiscites in Europe if more Allied armies had been available, but the campaign of intimidation and every sort of ruthlessness which occurred in Upper Silesia and Schleswig make us look rather askance upon this method of registering the popular will. Mr. Buxton airily asks for a plebiscite over the whole of the historical province of Macedonia, ignoring altogether the special difficulty that "Macedonia" means something quite different to the Serb, the Bulgar and the Greek. He dismisses likewise the universal difficulty of plebiscites, which is to be just in laying down the limits of the various regions. But there is really no need for Mr. Buxton to take us on to those quagmires, since he knows, and is good enough to tell us, what the result of the plebiscite will be. "The Bulgarian sympathies," says he, "of the mass of the Macedonian population are apparent to every inquiring traveller." If Mr. Buxton were to encounter one of those pretty lawless Karakačan nomads, who from the Monastir district wander all over the Balkans, his recognition of the man's Roman and Thraco-Illyrian descent would be facilitated by the permanent cheesy odour which pervades his person. There is nothing so permanent about the Macedonian Slav. His sympathies, as is natural, have gone out to that Balkan country which cultivated him and since, as Dr. Milovanović, the Serbian statesman, says, "the Serbs did not begin to think about Macedonia till 1885," it would indeed have been extraordinary if the Macedonian Slavs—whose ethnical position, as scientists agree, is such a vague one—had been generally drawn to Serbia. One cannot help feeling that in this book Mr. Buxton does a serious disservice to his reputation as a Balkan expert. He says that Serbia until the accession of King Peter was Austrophil; which is, to put it mildly, a very sweeping remark—only that party which called itself Progressive was identified with Milan's views. He praises the Bulgars for being devoted to their national Church, and praises them for producing a large number of Protestants, whose sincerity, etc., so that one presumes he would have praised them still more if the whole nation, as was once on the cards, had joined the Protestant Church. Save me from my friends! the Bulgars might say. What is perfectly sincere about them is their patriotism; and while some of those who now change their religion have doubtless no ulterior, personal motive, the entire country would probably have as little reluctance as Japan in adopting any religion which, like the Exarchist Church of to-day, would be an instrument of the national cause. Mr. Buxton's knowledge of the Balkan protagonists has its limitations; for example, prior to Bulgaria's entry into the War he was all for the removal of the British Minister on account of his pro-Serbian sympathies, but he says no word about M. Savinsky, the Russian Minister, who was left by his Entente colleagues to play the first violin. This capricious gentleman was no diplomat, but a courtier. He did not even protest when German munitions for Turkey passed through Roumania, and far too much of his time was spent in motoring with pretty girls in the neighbourhood of Sofia. Many good observers were of opinion that with a more competent Russian representative, such as M. Nekludoff, who in 1914 was transferred to Stockholm, the situation would have been saved. In their memorandum submitted in January 1915 to Lord (then Sir Edward) Grey, Messrs. N. and C. R. Buxton said that their experience of fifteen years convinced them that the Bulgarian sentiment of the Macedonians could not in a short time be made to give way to another national sentiment. If we rule out, as being slaves of circumstance, all the Macedonians who now tell you that from Bulgar they have changed to Serb, there is no reason why we should not credit those who are so weary of the rival activities of both parties that they wish for peace and nothing else. They would follow, not the Messrs. Buxton, but the priest of the Bulgarian village of Chuprenia, who told me that he held that one might pray to God for the success of the Bulgarian arms, without saying whether they were in the right or in the wrong. After the end of the war this priest sent a telegram, which was perhaps a little indiscreet, advocating that the Bulgarian people should join in Yugoslavia.