or their own principles, the Christian-Socialist party, whose
supporters were chiefly the small farmers, would prefer to legislate for
them, while the Liberal party, having in its ranks the larger
landowners, would wish that all, except the very largest, should if
possible be left intact; the very large landowners, moreover, will with
the spread of democratic ideas lose their influence over the voters.
There are several points on which all parties are agreed: thus, it is
most undesirable that a man's holdings should, as now, be separated from
each other, often by considerable distances, so that half his time may
be spent in going to and from his fields and a good deal of the other
half in the disputes which naturally spring from such a scattered
ownership.... In Bosnia, where the Agrarian troubles had produced such
frequent outbreaks and savage repression, the Austrians were given the
mandate in 1878 in the hope that they would regulate this matter. They
did not do very much; all that they really did was to modernize a
little. They wrote down in a book who was the landlord and who were the
kmets, and a copy of these details was available for each one of the
kmets. He had the right to remain where he was--unless his conduct was
exceptionally bad--and to retain two-thirds of the produce of the land.
This kmet-right was not hereditary in the female line; but the kmet
could buy his portion--this was an old right, which Austria
regulated--and become a free man, a beg. He would sometimes be a free
man in one place and a kmet in another. In Bosnia there are, of course,
some extremely large landowners; but most of the begs are poor folk, who
live on the third part of a few farms. It would be better if these men
were not compensated with cash, but rather that they should be
established on farms which they would work themselves, the distinction
between the small begs and the kmets thus disappearing.

THE PROBLEM OF AGRARIAN REFORM

A special Ministry was created to supervise, throughout Yugoslavia, the
question of Agrarian Reform; but the Cabinet was frequently engaged in
discussing this important topic and, many months afterwards, when the
ownership of a good deal of the land had been changed, it was
acknowledged that the problem had been attacked more often than it had
been solved. Mr. Pa[vs]i['c], who does not believe in hasty legislation,
pointed out that the Austrians had in forty years done really very
little in Bosnia.