h reality and idealism, and avoiding all extremes and extravagances,
to which poverty necessarily leads the working class in other countries,
are powerfully promoting human progress, the material as well as the
moral. Your nobility, far from being corrupted and degenerated by their
wealth, have filled the world with astonishment from the beginning of
this war by their extraordinary patriotism and willingness to sacrifice
everything, including life itself, in the struggle for the honour and
the unshakable ideals of their country.

That is why I am protesting before you, valiant sons and daughters of
Great Britain, the heirs of the most valuable heritage that ever a
nation could call its own. Serbian life in peace time is the most
eloquent accusation and the mightiest protest against the crime of two
great Christian Kaisers. These two Christian Kaisers conquered Serbia by
their iron and mercilessness, and bound Serbia's throat so horribly that
in Serbia there is now air and light only for the conquerors and not for
the conquered. Breath-less and breadless, Serbia cannot protest, but I
can. Well, I propose to describe to you to-night Serbia and the Serbians
in peace time, in order to show you what life your smallest allies lived
before the great storm came over their country. I will begin with:

THE SERBIAN VILLAGE.

Why? Because the village is the very foundation of all that we possess
in material, spiritual and moral good. After the Turks conquered Serbia,
five hundred years ago, the Serbian population was forced by the
conquerors by degrees to abandon the towns and to retreat into the
villages, and then to abandon even the villages in the plains, on the
banks of the rivers, where the soil was the most fruitful, and to escape
into the forests, mountains and less accessible country. The village
thus became the very soil upon which has grown our democracy. That is
the difference between our democracy and the west European, where the
democrats movement started and developed in the towns. Driven into the
forests and mountains by the common enemy, despoiled of freedom and
riches the upper and lower classes, the learned and the illiterate,
suffered the same abasement and injustice, did the same work, ploughed
and sowed, struggled against the same evil, the Turkish yoke, and sang
of the same hopes. Under such conditions was born our democratic spirit,
which served wonderfully afterwards, in the time of liberation and
freedom,