to the people's requirements. The darkness in which they lived
was so profound that when Montenegro had to pay the interest on a
six-million-franc loan from Great Britain no one in Cetinje could
calculate how much was due; a telegram was therefore sent to London
asking for this information and the date when payment should be made. If
his people did not prevent him from allocating merely 11,000 francs to
the Ministry of Justice for the increase of salaries and so forth, while
the Ministry of the Interior received 700,000 francs for the work of
spying, the expense of killing people and various propaganda--both these
items being labelled "special expenses"--then Nikita had no fault to
find with his Skup[vs]tina. Things were almost as satisfactory as before
1907, when for the first time a budget was issued and the people were
told how their contributions were spent. The personal property of the
sovereign had indeed been formally separated from that of the State in
1868; but Nikita's manipulations were so little supervised that, even
when he had established the Skup[vs]tina, he could say with truth,
"L'etat c'est moi." The Skup[vs]tina of 1918 was going to make vast
changes.

THE STATE OF BOSNIA

In Bosnia, for some time after the Austrian collapse, it was
inconvenient to travel. If you went by rail you were fortunate if you
secured a good berth on the roof of a carriage; by road you went less
rapidly and therefore ran a greater risk of being waylaid by the
so-called "Green Depot," who were deserters from the Austrian
army--either through national or other reasons--with their headquarters
in the forests. Some of them were simply men who had gone home on leave
and stayed at home. Here and there a National Guard of peaceful
citizens, irrespective of nationality, was formed against them. But it
was some time before they were induced to lead a less romantic life.
What happened afterwards in Bosnia between the Serbs, the Croats and the
Moslems was so much a matter of routine that the Italians should not
have run off with the idea that this imperilled Yugoslavia. Of the
1,898,044 inhabitants in 1910 the proportions were as follows: Orthodox,
who call themselves Serbs, 43.49 per cent.; Moslem, 32.25 per cent.; and
Catholics, who call themselves Croats, 22.87 per cent. (The remainder
are miscellaneous persons, such as 850,000 Jews, who speak the usual
Balkan Spanish; they play an inconsiderable part in public life.) The
Serbs,