stible party--largely composed of Turks, Magyars, Albanians,
Germans and others--their activity in and out of Parliament was not
confined to words. In June 1920 they only refrained from throwing bombs
in the Skup[vs]tina because one of their own members would have been in
peril, and in December a plot against the Prince-Regent and some of the
Ministers was foiled. Thereupon the Emergency Act of December 27, the
so-called Obznana, came into existence. It suspended all Communist
associations. This Act was issued for the good of the country, but was
not previously presented to the Constituent Assembly or provided with
the royal signature. How justified were the authorities in thus putting
a stop to this party could be seen when some of the Communist deputies
were interrogated, for either they were dangerous fanatics or else very
ignorant individuals, who knew no more about any other question than
about Communism, and had only been elected because they professed
dissatisfaction with things in general. A few months later Mr.
Dra[vs]kovi['c], the very able Minister of the Interior, who had drawn
up the Obznana, but who by that time had laid down the seals of office,
was murdered by Communists at a seaside resort in the presence of his
wife and little children. The object of this particular outrage was to
persuade the authorities in panic to withdraw the hated Obznana, whereas
the previous attempts on various personages seem to have been greatly
due to the desire to show some positive result in return for the cash
which came to them from Moscow. (One of the leaders of the party, the
ex-professor of mathematics, was arrested last summer in Vienna on his
return from Moscow, with a large and very miscellaneous collection of
English, French, American, Russian and other money.) After the murder of
Mr. Dra[vs]kovi['c] the mandates of the Communist deputies were
suppressed; seven or eight of them were detained, for speedy trial, and
the rest were told to go to their homes. The Communist parliamentary
party was at an end--it was established that their Committee room in the
Skup[vs]tina had been used for highly improper purposes--but there was
nothing to prevent these ex-deputies from being elected as members of
any other party, and it was rather beside the mark for an English
review, the _Labour Monthly_,[51] to talk of the "White Terror in
Jugo-Slavia," as if there prevailed in that country anything comparable
with Admiral Horthy's reg