the prices
paid by these receivers of stolen property was a good deal higher than
forty lire. When Signor di Ambris travelled to Rome in the merry month
of June and enjoyed a consultation with the Prime Minister, who by this
time was Signor Giolitti, it was not in order to explain any such
transactions as that one of the boots, but for the purpose, we are told,
of offering the services of d'Annunzio and his legionaries in Albania.
The regular Italian army was just then being roughly handled by the
natives.... It may be that Signor di Ambris wanted guarantees that if
the d'Annunzian troops were to come to the rescue, they would not suffer
the fate of the Yugoslavs who in the Great War had managed to desert to
Italy, had valiantly fought and won many decorations and--after the
War--been ignominiously interned. And they had given no grounds for
charges of financial frailty.

PROGRESS OF THE YUGOSLAV IDEA

The months go by and Yugoslavia still survives. At the post-office of a
large village in Syrmia, not far from Djakovo, where Bishop Strossmayer
laboured during fifty-five years for the union of the Southern Slavs
which he was destined not to see, a bulky farmer told me that in his
opinion Yugoslavia, created in 1918, was now in 1920 "kaput." He deduced
this from the fact that a telegram used to travel much more
expeditiously in Austrian days; but he did not remember that the
Yugoslavs, in the Serbian and in the Austro-Hungarian armies, had
suffered enormous losses in the War, and that while French, Dutch and
Swiss doctors have been obtained by the Belgrade Government, one cannot
use telegraphists who are ignorant of the language. An excellent
province in which Yugoslavia's solidity can be studied is Bosnia. At the
outbreak of the War the Moslems and Croats were not imbued with the
Yugoslav idea; it seemed to them that the Serbs, one of whom had slain
the Archduke, were traitors to Southern Slavdom. During the War the
Croats and Moslems were taught by their Slav officers to be good
nationalists and were given frequent lessons in the art of going over to
the enemy. After the Armistice one did not see every Serb, Croat and
Moslem in Bosnia forthwith forgetting all the evil of the past. Among
the less enlightened certain private acts of vengeance had to be
performed; but these were not as numerous as one might have expected.
And very soon the population of Bosnia came to be interested far less in
the old religious differ