has also very firm ideas for the safeguarding of the human
dignity of the pensioners.

(3) Dr. Rado[vs]evi['c]'s party. This gentleman was said
to adore Lenin, on whom he lectured. His party had no
strength except such as it derived as a protest against
any forced centralization.

(_f_) Republican party, consisting of 90,000 Croat peasants
under Radi['c].

Of these by far the most important were the first two. In Serbian
political parties the personal question used to be nearly always
uppermost, and now, in the case of parties (_a_) and (_b_), it was most
difficult to understand what aims the one had which the other did not
share. One may say that each of them was a group under a wily politician
who was able, not only to forge out of various elements a homogeneous
group, but to persuade them that there was a fundamental difference
between their group and any other. Here one has not so much the Western
system, under which a man enters a Cabinet as the exponent of party
principles, but the Eastern system under which a Minister uses his
influence to found a party, which is based inevitably on the
disappearing relics of the past. In the spring of 1919 many foreign
observers fancied that new parties were surging up like mushrooms and
proving, no doubt, that the people's vitality was strong, although one
would have waited willingly for this evidence until the country's
external and internal affairs were more settled. As a matter of fact
these rather numerous parties, of which the outside world now heard for
the first time, had been in existence or semi-existence for years. There
was, however, a certain bewildering vacillation on the part of some of
the deputies. The Bosnian Moslems, for instance, could not make up their
minds whether they would be Serbs or Croats and belong to (_a_) or
(_b_). Finally most of them settled down in (_b_), while two others
formed an independent group. It must be remembered that they, like all
the other deputies, were not really deputies but delegates, since it was
not yet possible to hold elections. There would naturally be many
changes after the first General Election; for one thing, the Moslems
intend to join in one group with their brethren from Macedonia and Novi
Bazar.... As we shall see, later on, the changes produced by the first
General Election--which was the election held in November 1920, for the
Constituent Assembly--were