d
anybody do? Hundreds of houses are deserted; and for the year 1920 the
owners of the theatre--which did not engage expensive actors but relied
mainly on cinema--were faced with a deficit of 12,000 lire.

The Triest-Istrian Free State would approximately contain, without Pola,
some 300,000 inhabitants, half Italian and half Yugoslav. The formation
of this State would be less advantageous to the Yugoslavs, for most of
the big landowners and the shop-keepers are Italians who live on the
Yugoslav peasants; but Yugoslavia, for the sake of peace, would be glad
to see the State come into existence. Eastern and central Istria,
forming a part of Yugoslavia and lying between the two Free States,
should extend to Porto di Bado, which would cause it to possess about
3,000 Italians and 280,000 Yugoslavs. If it were to be bounded by the
Ar[vs]a it would make the Italians in the Triest-Istrian State become a
minority.

With respect to the indisputable Slav districts east of the Isonzo,
_i.e._ the territory of Gorica-Gradi[vs]ca and an appreciable part of
Carniola, which have been adjudged to Italy and which long to be joined
to the Yugoslav State, there are two possible solutions. (In passing we
may observe that there is no country where the national frontier is more
clearly indicated. The linguistic frontier is so strictly defined that
the peasant on one side of it does not speak Italian and his neighbour
on the other side does not understand the Slovene tongue. Nevertheless,
Signor Colajanni, the venerable leader of the Italian Republicans, took
up an undemocratic point of view and declined to admit the argument of
the superiority of numbers, when he alluded to this frontier in a speech
to the Republican Congress at Naples. Waving numbers aside, he preferred
to appeal to history and culture, though he should have known that the
mass of the Slovene people is much better educated than the Italian
peasant.) The true ethnographical boundary would be the Isonzo--not many
Yugoslavs live to the west and not many Italians to the east of that
river. Only in the town of Gorica do we find Italians. In 1910 at the
census the Italian municipal authorities attempted to show that their
town was almost entirely Italian; at a subsequent census the Austrians
found that the returns had been largely falsified, and that in reality
Gorica contained 14,000 Italians and 12,000 Slovenes, while it is common
knowledge that if you go 500 yards from the town