e effected in a less arbitrary fashion than in France,
where no account was taken of the former provinces--it can scarcely be
maintained that, of itself, this part of the centralizing programme in
Yugoslavia is so very drastic.

Whatever one may think about the Balkan peoples it is a fact that the
essential Serb, the Serb from [vS]umadia, is a pacific person, rather
lazy perhaps, but certainly more devoted to dancing than to battle. And
some of the wiser Serbs were dubious in 1919 and 1920 as to whether the
most sagacious methods were being employed in Croatia. Radi['c] was in
prison, but they were told that this impetuous demagogue was insisting
on a republic, and the Croat _intelligentsia_ were far from happy. It is
true that in the elections of November 1920 the National party, as the
Star[vc]evists now called themselves, had no great success; but the
Radi['c] party had more than half the seats. Surely this had not been
brought about merely by the chief's imprisonment? There seemed to be in
that province some wider, some growing dissatisfaction. And in the
spring of 1921 most of the Catholic Croats, those within and those
without the Radi['c] party, were nourishing a score of grievances. No
doubt a large proportion of these were unavoidable (in view of the state
of Central Europe) or were rather trivial (the mayor of an important
town told me that he, who was under the Minister of the Interior, had
received an order from the Belgrade Minister of War, with respect to the
detention of deserters--conditions, said he, were not so primitive in
the Austro-Hungarian monarchy) and sometimes the grievances were against
the Habsburgs (for not having made them more fit to assume these new
responsibilities), and sometimes they were against the Serbs for being
less civilized--though they might be more moral--than themselves, and
sometimes the grievances were personal: now and then after the Austrian
collapse a Serbian officer or his men, uncertain of the feelings of the
population, had acted with unwise, or rather with inexpedient,
vigour--instead of shooting those who in the general anarchy were laying
waste and plundering, they merely flogged them, and this was for a long
time remembered against them, although the Croat _intelligentsia_ who
had taken service in the police flogged in a far more wholesale fashion.
But down at the bottom of all the grievances there is the fundamental
fact that the Southern Slavs yearn to be comrade