ia. The twofold folly of this plan was not grasped at
the moment; but for several years the Serbian frontier districts were
regularly invaded and plundered. The following years of Turkish misrule,
and especially the young Turkish policy of treacherous force, which
resulted in Albanian risings every year, may possibly have caused many
Albanians to be honestly glad when the Balkan War brought the Serbs into
their country. But of these Albanians not a few would rejoice because
they hoped that with the help of the Serbian army it would be possible
to slay the members of some adjacent tribe against whom they happened to
have a feud. Perhaps the Serbs were so eager to bathe their horses in
the Adriatic that they did not notice such trifles as the destruction of
a ford, this having been done to prevent a visit from undesirable
neighbours. One might have imagined that Serbia, being well known as a
land of small peasant proprietors--where there is even a law which
forbids a peasant's house from being sold over his head; he is, under
any circumstances, assured of so much as will enable him to eke out a
livelihood--one would have thought that the Albanian _[vc]if[vc]ija_,
who is nothing more than a slave of the feudal chief, would have
rejoiced at the arrival of a liberator; and indeed, while the Serbian
troops were in Albania the peasant refused to give his lord the
customary third or half of what the land produced, and after the
departure of the Serbs he was unapproachable for tax-collectors. Who
knows whether this social readjustment, so auspiciously begun, might not
have made Albania wipe out her grievances against the Serbs and remember
only that in the Imperial days of Du[vs]an, even if he was not of the
most ancient Balkan race, there was prosperity and happiness where now
is desolation; busy merchants in the seaport towns of Albania, which
now are ruins; ships sailing in from Venice with the luxuries of all
the world and taking back with them all those good things, a half of
which Albania has forgotten how to make? And after that there had been
times of friendship with the Serb--Dositej Obradovi['c], the philologist
(one of those amiable persons who invented for the Albanians an
alphabet), tells us, for instance, how in his travels through Albania he
was assured by natives that they and the Serbs lived together as if they
were members of one family, while the Ku['c]i in eastern Montenegro had,
by a gradual process of assimil