ying
that which has no bottom, an abyss, and the marshes in the Banat are
numerous. The Beesd of the above citation is, said the librarian, a
place between the rivers Temes and Berzava; Catholics were there in
the fourteenth century, but the founders were Slavs. The burly
archimandrate of Besdin, whose constitution had withstood
twenty-seven years of marshes and mosquitoes, was extremely scornful
of his adversaries' pretensions. "They wanted to prove that they built
it! Not one stone, not a single stone! Then they argued that something
was due to them as they had paid a part of the church taxes. We had
invited them!" ... Most of the Serbs acknowledge that their
monasteries in the Voivodina, as elsewhere, are not under present
conditions as meritorious as in the Middle Ages when the people from
twenty or thirty villages would meet there and listen to the blind
guslar-player. Sometimes one of their few monks is a man of erudition,
such as the well-known Bishop Nicholai Velimirovi['c] or Ruvarac the
great historian, who in thirty years freed his monastery from debt and
left large sums for charities. On the other hand we have the
archimandrate Radi['c], who ruled several monasteries in succession;
he never drove with less than four horses in his carriage and he drove
so recklessly that between eight and sixteen horses were rendered
worthless every year. The Radical party desired, after paying fixed
salaries to the archimandrates and monks, to give two-thirds of the
rest to clerical funds and one-third to schools. But the
Austro-Hungarian Government had an understanding with the clerical
party and prevented the public from exercising any control over these
funds. The twenty-seven monasteries in the Voivodina, Syrmia and
Croatia could have supported three Universities, so richly endowed are
they with lands; the Roumanians did in fact with some of the revenues
of their one monastery of Hodosh maintain the Arad seminary. There is
no knowing what other monasteries the Roumanians would have secured if
the Great War had not intervened, for the Pest judges knew every
morning which of the two litigant countries their own country happened
to prefer.

What the Serbs of the Banat had, in the political world, to contend
against may be illustrated by some incidents of the career of Dr.
Svetozar Mileti['c], who after having been a deputy for twenty-five
years was charged with high treason for having sent volunteers into
Serbia at the ti