held up to ridicule by
Strossmayer. It was the Yugoslav Committee, working chiefly in London,
assisted by English friends, working there and at Corfu, which caused
the Serbs, the Croats and Slovenes to publish on July 20, 1917, the
historic Corfu Declaration, which laid it down that the nation of the
three names was resolved to free itself from every foreign yoke and to
become a constitutional, democratic and Parliamentary Monarchy under
the Karageorgevi['c] dynasty. It is said that those two excellent
friends of the Southern Slavs, the brilliant Mr. Wickham Steed and Dr.
Seton-Watson, than whom no publicist is more conscientious, had to
face a determined opposition on the part of M. Pa[vs]i['c] before it
was agreed that the Roman Catholic religion should in the prospective
State have equal rights with the Orthodox. One would be disposed to
criticize the Serbian Premier on account of a narrow policy dictated
by his excessive wish for self-preservation--he saw very well that
these clauses of equality might undermine the long reign of the
Radicals--but it must be acknowledged that if the Southern Slavs had
limited themselves to a Greater Serbia, in which the Radical party had
been supreme, they would not have wasted so much of their energy,
after the War, in domestic political conflict. They would also, very
probably, have gained more favourable terms from the Entente; and the
union with the Croats and Slovenes might have been effected later. But
against this is the opinion of those who argue that the separation
would have become permanent. However, if the union of the Southern
Slavs could not be postponed, we may believe that it would have been
wise to call the new country, for a couple of years, Greater Serbia.
No doubt the logical Italians would have pointed out to the rest of
the Entente that their bugbears, the Croats and the Slovenes, were
included in this State; but the Allies as a whole would have been more
inclined to be indulgent towards a country whose name they honoured
than towards the same country whose various new-fangled
designations--Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes; or
Yugoslavia; or S.H.S.--they found so puzzling. The Transylvanians who,
one supposes, will play the chief role in Greater Roumania have as
yet, much to the profit of all the Roumanians, permitted the retention
of that name. This course was not adopted by the Southern Slavs, and
Pa[vs]i['c] giving way to Messrs. Steed and Seton-Wats