He was told, however, that in Croatia, for example,
the revolutionary spirit at the end of the War was so intense that if
the Government were to postpone the necessary reforms then the people
would simply seize whatever land they wished to have. It is true that
violence was rampant in those parts--the peasants believed that with
Austria's collapse there would arrive the Earthly Paradise, and in order
to bring this about they ravaged a good many fine estates and set fire
to various castles. They were going to stand no nonsense. At a place
called Lubi[vs]ica in Croatia--where the 350 families lived in 260
houses--the landowner, out of the goodness of his heart, bestowed twenty
"joch" of meadowland on the village in 1864. A law was passed which
obliged him to devote a certain amount of land to the support of the
church and the school--he gave the identical twenty joch. And at the end
of the War the peasants maintained that at last this land was going to
be restored to them; they drove their cattle on to it, but the priest
with the help of _gendarmerie_ drove them off again. Once more the
cattle came back and then the priest seized a gun; he fired at his
parishioners and wounded in the head a sixteen-year-old boy, as well as
three other persons. This so enraged the village that they went in a
body and slew the priest.... And the authorities, although at that
period they were faced with so many problems, attempted to settle right
away this very complicated question. The Dobrovoljci--volunteers with
the Yugoslav forces who had come home from the United States, Canada and
Australia or who had managed to escape from the Austro-Hungarian
army--had been promised so many acres, each of them, after the War. And
these Dobrovoljci and the agitated peasants found that the land was, so
to speak, thrust upon them. A lawyer-politician would take a map, would
assign a certain area to A, another to B, and imagine he had done a good
morning's work; but unhappily the lawyer often forgot that a farm, to be
of any use to its tenant, must have a road leading to it, must have a
well, a cart, a horse, some oxen and so forth--to say nothing of a
dwelling-place. Thus it would happen that the new tenant would go to
look at his holding and in disgust would go away, or--contrary to
law--would sublet it or sell it back to the original owner. If, on the
other hand, he remained the State would, from an economical point of
view, only benefit in those region