assailing each
other. So blind, alas! were these statesmen that all the tears of St.
Petka would not have cured them, and now the two kindred people, so
progressive in many ways, are--to speak of each people as a
whole--further apart than when their shaggy forefathers came over the
Carpathians. It has been the fate of the Yugoslavs--Slovenes, Croats,
Serbs and Bulgars--to live for centuries beside each other and be kept
always, by foreign masters, isolated from each other. At rare
intervals, as we shall see in following their history, a person has
arisen who has tried, with altruistic or with selfish motives, to make
some sort of union of the Yugoslavs. And now we will go back to the
time when Slavs first wandered westward to the Balkans.

I

GLORY AND DISASTER

ARRIVAL OF THE SOUTHERN SLAVS--THEIR UNFORTUNATE DEMOCRATIC WAYS--TWO
EARLY STATES--ECCLESIASTICAL ROCKS--THE SLAVS AND THEIR
NEIGHBOURS--SIMEON THE BULGAR--WHAT ARE THE BULGARS?--STEPHEN
NEMANIA--THE SLOVENES ARE SUBMERGED--THE FATE OF THE CROATS--THE GLORY
OF DUBROVNIK--A GALLANT REPUBLIC--THE GLORIOUS DU[vS]AN--EVIL DAYS AND
THE PEOPLE'S HERO--THE "GOOD CHRISTIANS" OF BOSNIA--KOSSOVO--GATHERING
DARKNESS.

ARRIVAL OF THE SOUTHERN SLAVS

The Slavs who in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries came down from
the Carpathian Mountains were known, until the ninth century, as
Slovenes (Sloventzi);[4] and if, as is natural, the Serbs and Croats
wish to preserve their time-honoured names, they will perhaps agree to
call their whole country by the still more ancient name of Slovenia,
instead of the merely geographical and not wholly popular term
Yugoslavia. Considering that this name (Slovenija) found favour in the
eyes of their great Emperor Stephen Du[vs]an, one would imagine that
the Serbs might adopt it in preference to the cumbrous "Kingdom of the
Serbs, Croats and Slovenes," with its unlovely abbreviation into three
letters of the alphabet. The Croats would be glad of this solution,
and thus the Yugoslavs would, unlike their relatives the Russians, the
Poles and the Czechs, have the satisfaction of living in a country
called Slovenia, the land of the Slavs.... But, although this would be
a happy solution, it seems much more probable that eventually the name
Yugoslavia will be adopted. Everyone is agreed that one inclusive
word, answering to Britain and British, is necessary. "Evo na[vs]ih!"
["Here are our men!"] were the words used by the Serbs, Cr