es on flame amid the pallor of his
face--his luminous and martyred face, to use the expression of his
friends--he never for a moment relaxed his efforts; if those who opposed
him were numerous it was all the more reason why he must be resolute.
The role fitted him very well, for he is the dourest politician in
Yugoslavia--a perfectly honest, upright, injudicious patriot. His
Democratic party had now taken the place of the Serbo-Croat Coalition
and it saw the other parties in Croatia gradually drifting back again
from it or rather from the dominating man; if his place had been
occupied by his afore-mentioned colleague, the burly and beloved
Du[vs]an Popovi['c], there would have been in Zagreb a very much suaver
atmosphere. But unfortunately Popovi['c] is a wealthy man, a highly
successful lawyer who cares little for the tumult of politics.... It was
a thorny problem, whether the State should be constituted on a federal
or a centralized basis.[63] The federation of the United States depends
on the centralization of political parties, whereas in Yugoslavia the
parties have only just begun to combine. Feudalism in the German Empire
rested on the predominance of Prussia, a position which the Serbs are,
under present conditions, loth to occupy in Yugoslavia. In Germany,
moreover, many of the States used to be independent, while in Yugoslavia
this was only the case with Serbia and Montenegro. Centralism would tend
to obliterate the tribal divisions, but on the other hand it brings in
its train bureaucracy, which is slow, cumbrous and often corrupt; it
demands unusually good central institutions and first-rate
communications, neither of which are as yet in a satisfactory state. The
constitution has arrived at a compromise between the federal and the
centralized systems. A writer in the _Contemporary Review_ (November
1921) said that the division of the whole of Yugoslavia into some
twenty administrative areas [he should have said thirty-three] to
replace the racial areas, was a very drastic proposal to put forward;
and he added that when the historic provincial divisions of France were
broken up into departments, the nation had been prepared by nearly 200
years of centralization under the monarchy. It is a flaw in his argument
to say that the previously existing areas were racial, whereas
populations of identical race were divided from one another by the
course of events. And in the proposed obliteration of these
divisions--to b