Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 15, 2025
No settlement will be complete which ignores the Slovenes of eastern Istria, Carniola, and southern Carinthia and Styria: they must share the fate of their Croat and Serb kinsmen. On the north it would be comparatively easy to draw a new frontier corresponding to the main requirements of ethnography, geography, and strategy.
These were concerned with the liquidation of the Hapsburg Empire, but not with that fragment of it to which Austria had been reduced by the recognition of Czecho-Slovakian independence, the transference of Galicia to Poland, and the union of Croats and Slovenes under the Serbian crown.
But here again the misfortune which awaited the Jugo-Slavs was that historically three religions had taken deep root, the Catholic among the Slovenes and Croats, and the Mohammedan and Orthodox among the Serbs.
There is no reason why such a State should not continue to exist, provided that it retained the necessary access to the sea at Trieste and Pola, and this would involve the exclusion of the Slovenes from the new Jugo-Slav State.
Already there have been manifestations of friction between the Serbs and the Croats and between the Serbs and the Slovenes, to say nothing of the open hostility which exists between the Serbs and certain Montenegrin factions, to which I have alluded in a preceding chapter.
Austria has 26,000,000 inhabitants, of whom 9,000,000 are Germans, 1,000,000 Italians and Rumanians, 6,000,000 Bohemians and Slovacs, 8,000,000 Poles and Ruthenians, 2,000,000 Slovenes and Croatians. Of the 19,000,000 of Hungary there are 9,000,000 Magyars, 2,000,000 Germans, 2,500,000 Slovacs and Ruthenians, 3,000,000 Rumanians, and nearly 3,000,000 Southern Slays.
The significance of the Bulgars will be dealt with elsewhere, and of the Slovenes it will suffice for our present purpose to say that they are a small and ancient race, of vigorous stock and clerical leanings, whose true importance lies in their geographical position and its latent possibilities for the future.
They are only hesitantly and tentatively Macedonians, or Moldovans, or Belarusians, or Kazakhs, or Yugoslavs. The likes of the Czechs, the Estonians and the Slovenes are well-suited to become constituents of a larger whole. They make better Europeans than the British, or the Norwegians.
Because I was curious to see for myself how the countrymen of Andreas Hofer in South Tyrol would accept their enforced Italianization; whether the Italians of Fiume would obey the dictum of President Wilson that their city must be Slav; how the Turks of Smyrna and the Bulgarians of Thrace would welcome Hellenic rule; whether the Croats and Slovenes and Bosnians and Montenegrins were content to remain pasted in the Jugoslav stamp-album; and because I wished to travel through these disputed regions while the conditions and problems thus created were still new, we set out, my wife and I, at about the time the Peace Conference was drawing to a close, on a journey, made largely by motor-car and destroyer, which took us from the Adige to the Vardar and from the Vardar to the Pruth, along more than five thousand miles of those new national boundaries drawn in Paris by a lawyer, a doctor and a college professor which have been termed, with undue optimism perhaps, the frontiers of freedom.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking