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To the north there was perpetual conflict with the Habsburgs of German Austria and with the forces of the Holy Roman Empire; to the east there were spasmodic quarrels with the Vlachs, the natives of modern Rumania; to the south there was continual fighting, at first with the Greeks and the Slavs Serbs and Bulgars, and later, most terrible of all, with the Ottoman Turks.
The invasions of the Hungarians and Slavs in the eleventh century effectually prevented the blossoming of any literary effort, except for some poems known as the Lombard Cycle, in which the rude pagan legends of antiquity were blended with the dawnings of Christianity.
On the contrary: she held mistakenly or not that Germany had been the victim of secret diplomacy, had been encircled by a ring fence of enemies, refused the economic guarantees she required, and the colonial expansion she desired. Minna disliked the Slavs, did not believe in them, save as musicians, singers, painters, dancers, and actors.
In the kingdoms and provinces represented in the Reichsrath in Vienna there are nearly 10,000,000 Germans and 18,500,000 non-Germans. Of these nearly 17,500,000 are Slavs. Among these Slavs, the Croats and Serbs number 780,000, chiefly in Dalmatia, while there are in all 660,000 Orthodox and nearly 3,500,000 Greek Uniats.
For there are not now, as in the Roman times, any great reservoirs of energetic barbaric life. Goths, Gauls, Germans, Slavs, Tartars. The world is very full of people, but all fixed in civilizations of their own, and they all have all our vices, all our mechanisms, and all our means of destruction. This time, the leading civilization cannot die out as Greece, Rome, Persia died.
We are witnessing the birththroes of a new nation, the triumph of the idea of national unity among the disunited Southern Slavs, and it is the duty of Britain and France, whose Fleets are now operating on the Adriatic, to insist upon a just and permanent solution, based upon the principle of nationality and the wishes of the Southern Slav race.
The then unknown quantity of Albania was also a factor. This people, though small in numbers, was formidable in character, and had never been effectually subdued by the Turks. The population of Macedonia, being still under Turkish rule, was uneducated and ignorant; needless to say it had no national consciousness, though this was less true of the Greeks than of the Slavs.
The Slavs, whose numbers were without doubt very large, gradually settled all over the country south of the Danube, the rural parts of which, as a result of incessant invasion and retreat, had become waste and empty.
The Czech statesman Rieger once declared that when the Slavs no longer desired the existence of Austria, no one would be able to save her. And indeed, the claims raised by the majority of Austria's population to-day mean the death warrant of the Dual Monarchy.
Negotiations were hampered by the belief of the Italians that immediate peace with Austria would prevent them from securing the territories they coveted; by the sullen obstinacy of the Magyars, who were jealous of their mastery over the Hungarian Slavs, and above all, as Colonel House had foreseen, by Austria's fear of Germany.
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