lt, which the Austrians bought in that
country and on which they made an adequate profit. When the Yugoslavs
wanted to get their supplies direct from Germany the Austrians
introduced a transit tax of 1000 crowns--not the nearly worthless
Austrian but Yugoslav crowns--per waggon. Later on when the Danube was
thrown open and this tax could not be levied, salt was considerably
cheaper in Yugoslavia than in Austria. So with plums--in 1919 Austria
bought nearly the whole of the exports from Yugoslavia at six crowns per
kilo and sold them to Germany at eleven to twelve crowns, the profit
going, so the authorities said, to the poor.

As the day of the plebiscite approached, the Yugoslavs seemed to be more
confident than the Austrians. The staunch peasants of zone "A" were not
greatly impressed by the numerous appeals to their heart and brain which
were handed to them by the Austrians in the Slovene language. And they
were not much alarmed at the idea of being joined to their countrymen of
the south, those unmitigated Serbs who thrived, if one was to believe
the Austrian propaganda, on atrocities. But this warning was ridiculed
by the Austrians themselves--on a market day at Velikovec you could see
the Austrophils wearing their colours, which they would scarcely have
done if they had been afraid of possible reprisals--and zone "A" was
generally presumed to have a Yugoslav majority. On such a market day one
saw very few Yugoslav colours in the farmers' button-holes, for it was
the wish of their leaders to avoid anything which might give rise to
unnecessary conflict. The day drew near and the Austrians thought that
they were making insufficient progress; for one thing, they were at a
disadvantage owing to the very low value of their money. They hoped that
Germany would come with more zeal than ever to the rescue, and they
hoped that something fatal would occur to Yugoslavia. So they asked the
Inter-Allied Commissions to put it to their Governments that it would
be advisable if the plebiscite were to be postponed for several months,
say until May 1921. But it was reported that the French and British
representatives declined to countenance the scheme. They may also have
feared that if the period of canvassing were to be so long drawn out,
the same passions would come to the surface as in the plebiscite in east
and west Prussia, where in many places the Poles could not display their
sympathies except at great personal risk. But in th