y they call themselves Italian...." That is what she
says of a people which through centuries of persecution and neglect have
preserved their language, their traditions, their hopes; a people which,
more than forty years ago, won their great victory against the Habsburg
regime of Italian and Italianist officials, so that with one exception
every mayor in Dalmatia and all the Imperial deputies and hundreds of
societies of all kinds, such as 375 rural savings-banks, were
exclusively Yugoslav. Out of nearly 150,000 votes at the last general
election, which was held in 1911 on the basis of universal suffrage, the
Yugoslav candidates received about 145,000 against 5000 to 6000 for the
Italians. It is indisputable that the Dalmatian peasants are backward in
many things, but one is really sorry for the person who declares in
print that they possess no sense of nationality. Let her visit any house
of theirs on Christmas Eve and watch them celebrate the "badnjak"; let
her listen any evening to their songs. Let her think whether there is no
sense of nationality among the priests, who almost to a man are the sons
of Yugoslav peasants. And let her recollect that these are the days when
the other Yugoslavs are at last uniting in their own free State. She has
the hardihood to tell us of the poor Dalmatians who were being bribed
with waterworks and bridges and gratuitous doctoring. I daresay that the
little ragged Slav children of Kievo whom she saw clustering round the
kindly Italian officer were glad enough to eat his chocolates,[57] but I
think that we others should pay more attention to those secret
societies, the _[vc]etasis_ (which is Slav for komitadjis), who have
sworn to liberate all Istria from the Italians. We may also consider the
proposals made by the Southern Slavs whom Signor Salvemini, the
distinguished Professor of Modern History at Pisa, called "extreme
Nationalists" (see his letter of September 11, 1916, to the editor of
_La Serbie_, which was being published in Switzerland). Well, it appears
that the "extreme Southern Slav Nationalists," as the utmost of their
aspirations, claim the Southern Slav section of the province of Gorica
with the town Triest and the whole of Istria, that is to say, a
territory which, with a population the majority of whom are Slav,
contains also 284,325 Italians, whereas the smallest programme ever
proposed by moderate Italians, including Professor Salvemini, covets
some 364,000 Southern Sla