oats and
Slovenes as their troops marched past them in Paris during the Allied
celebration of July 1919. The Serbian Colonel of the Heiduk Velko
regiment, which was stationed at Split in 1920, and of which the other
officers were chiefly Croats, the men Moslem and Catholic, used in his
public addresses to speak of "Our kingdom." There are various
objections to the word Yugoslavia; in the first place, it was
introduced by the Austrians, who did not wish to call their subjects
Serbs and Croats; in the second place, the term is a literal
translation from the German and is against the laws of the
Serbo-Croatian language. Another, and more important objection, is
that the Bulgars, though Yugoslavs, are not included in Yugoslavia;
and perhaps the name will be officially adopted when the Bulgars join
the other Southern Slavs.

THEIR UNFORTUNATE DEMOCRATIC WAYS

These Southern Slavs did not display the same genius for organization
as the Germanic peoples or the Magyars at the period of their
respective migrations. In communities of brethren (or _bratsva_, from
the word _brat_, a brother) they had not raised up a king; but as a
compensation they possessed a lofty moral code, a religion inspired by
the worship of nature and by the principle of the immortality of the
soul. Occupying themselves with agriculture and the rearing of cattle,
it was not until they came into contact, that is to say hostile
contact, with their more organized neighbours that they were compelled
to join together under the authority of a prince, a _knez_. The bad
result of this profoundly democratic spirit was that the Slavs, not
knowing how to keep united, fell under the yoke of other nations. From
the interesting series of documents, Latin, Arabic, Byzantine and
others, which have been collected in _Monimenta Sclavenica_ by
Miroslav Premrou, notary public at Caporetto, and published in 1919 at
Ljubljana (Laibach), we can see that the Slovenes occupied a much
greater extent of territory than do their descendants of our day--"ab
ortu Vistulae ... per immensa spatia ..." (cf. _Jordanis de orig.
Goth._ c. 5)--to beyond the Tagliamento, and from the Piave (cf.
Ibrahim Ibn-Jakub[5]) to the Adriatic, the AEgean and the Black Sea.

One of the earliest of the above-named Slovene princes was Samo, a
Slovene by adoption, who struggled in Pannonia against the Avars in
the first half of the seventh century; it happened also in the year
626 that other Slovenes, as