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Updated: June 15, 2025
Serbia abandoned her own good name and took this name of Jugo-Slavia or Country of the southern Slavs, that she might form the basis of a commonwealth of all the southern Slav nationalities. And if she embraces Croats and Slovenes why not Bulgars, too?
But comparing Serbia as she is with this ex-Austria, one cannot but be struck with the disparity between them. Croats and Slovenes are Slav by race, but strongly Austrian by education. They were glad to come into the new confederation and escape some of the penalties of defeated Austria. But once they were definitely absorbed into the new State they did not feel so comfortable.
With only very slight deviations, this would follow the racial line between Slovenes and Germans from the present Italian frontier as far as the little town of Radkersburg in Styria; thence, the course of the rivers Mur and Drave as far as the latter's junction with the Danube.
Under such circumstances it would be possible to reconstruct the State on a federal basis, with five main racial units, the Germans, the Czechs and Slovaks, the Magyars, the Slovenes, and the Italians.
If this be true, the language doubtless was one of the principal reasons for it. With the language of the Cæsars also crept into the Church the spirit of the Cæsars. This spirit was brought to a triumph in 1870 at the Council of the Vatican. As the Croats and Slovenes protested against the language of the Cæsars, so they protested also against the triumphant spirit of the Cæsars in the Church.
Even before and after Trubar, the Slavs on the Adriatic coast of Dalmatia and Istria insisted on the so-called Glagoliza as the language which should be used in the divine service. Glagoliza is not the common language of the Croats and Slovenes, but it is an old and sacred form of the same tongue.
The truth of the matter is that the Croats and the Slovenes, though only too glad to escape the Allies' wrath by claiming kinship with the Serbs and taking refuge under the banner of Jugoslavia, at heart consider themselves immeasurably superior to their southern kinsmen, whose political dictation, now that the storm has passed, they are beginning to resent.
Yet so far from languishing under such a system, the movement for unity gained fresh strength and extended to the kindred Slovenes, striking root even among the extreme Clericals, who had hitherto regarded the Orthodox Serbs with distrust and suspicion.
In peace time, not only were the suppressed nations, such as the Czechs, Slovaks, Rumanians, Luthenians, Poles, Slovenes, Italians, but all the citizens of Austria-Hungary, denied the right of free speech and freedom of the Press.
When the Jugo-Slavs first occupied the western half of the Balkan peninsula, they were one in speech, in social customs and ancestry, and were divided only into tribes. The Slovenes, who settled in the northern end of the west Balkan block, were not separated from their Croat and Serb kinsmen by the forces of geography, but rather by the course of political evolution.
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