the pretty girls on whom his eye
had rested. Therefore the _[vc]if[vc]ija_ would lose the last shadow
of freedom, he would become a serf. His sowing and his reaping would
now be for another, and as it did not profit him at all to make the
land more fruitful, he was content with any prehistoric implement,
with little wooden ploughs and with a total absence of manure. And yet
this pitiable serf would often be in a position less deplorable than
that of one who had a little freedom left and who was called a free
man, for the Turk would treat him no worse than the mule whose
continual existence he desires. It does not seem surprising if these
Christians wanted to be liberated from the Turk and did not greatly
mind what uniform their rescuers would wear.

THE CHEERLESS STATE OF SERBIA

Meanwhile the Serbs of Hungary were saying that the state of things in
Serbia was desperate. It seemed so to a number of young men who found
the coldness of Prince Alexander and his anxiety to please the
Austrians both very much out of harmony with the new Liberal ideas of
Western Europe. They would have been horrified to see the plight of
Macedonia, which after the Crimean War became, if possible, still
worse, for during it the Porte took up the first loan; others
followed, and in a surprisingly short time the Turk stood face to face
with bankruptcy, so that in his dealings with the peasant he became
still more extortionate. To be sure the Liberal young men who were
publishing the _Omladinac_ and all those Southern Slavs who listened
to the voices which in Italy and Germany were craving union and
freedom, all of them saw in their dreams the freedom of the Southern
Slav, but Serbia and Montenegro were the only portions of his
patrimony which had any kind of independence and the Serbia of
Alexander was in a distressing state. The Prince had managed to stay
neutral during the Crimean War, in spite of the solicitations very
vehemently put by Austria and Russia and the Porte; this neutral
attitude secured for Serbia at the peace the benefit of having all her
rights henceforward guaranteed collectively by the Great Powers. Yet
Alexander was so anxious not to rouse the animosity of Austria that he
declined to summon the national assembly, the Skup[vs]tina, in which
the people's rising aspirations could be heard. And, although the
family community, the "zadruga," was giving way to a more modern way
of life--much to the misgiving of those persons w