ut the Foreign Office, the Education
Office, and other Government Departments are in buildings that might
well be blocks of flats or _pensions_ kept by respectable widows.

The population, if we rule out the Austrians, is mostly "the peasant
come to town"--a proletarian crowd, though not governed by proletarians
but by a small educated class plus an obedient army. You can see by
the women that it is a peasant people--not a jumper or a short skirt in
the whole of Belgrade. They are quiet-eyed and modest. The Serbs are
much harder than the Russians, and bear deeper in their souls the marks
of their historic chains. A tortured look in the face and a certain
dreadful impassivity of countenance are not uncommon. There is a
mixture of geniuses and of people who have not yet begun to live. They
have their Mestrovic, Velimirovic, Petronievic. Is there not in London
a certain M---- made not for our civilization but for two or three
grades higher in world development. Of those who have not yet begun to
live many are suspicious, violent, melancholy, with little instinct for
making life more or fuller, for living and letting live; in business
unenterprising and indisposed for work. The Serbs are potentially
gifted for literature, art, and thought; they are sincere and real in
temperament, but despite their efforts probably not gifted for modern
civilization as we know it.

As regards Belgrade, when prosperity returns we may see the growth of a
fine new city, not a complete town-planned Austrian city, supplied as
it were whole and in every part from a department store, but something
expressive of a new people. All these buildings we look upon to-day
are bound to pass into obscurity. The rising pillars of the
Skupstchina, Serbia's new Parliament House at the foot of Kossovo
Street, point to the future of some great new State.

The Croats say "When you go to Zagreb you will see the difference. Ah,
there is a city; there is civilization." They kiss their hands to show
what they mean. The Croats are Home Rulers. Like the Irish, they are
Catholics. Some of them look forward to the transfer of the capital to
Zagreb, and the changing of the letters of the kingdom to H.S.S. and
putting Hrvats first. Croats insist on the title Jugo-Slavia; Serbs
are inclined to drop it and revert to the name Serbia. The Germans
during the war are said to have promised the Croats to form the German
counterpart of the Allies' idea of Jugo-S