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The language, the customs, the architecture, the names over the shop-doors, the faces of the people everything is characteristically Italian. Outside of Trieste the zones of nationality are clearly divided: to the west, on the coast, dwell the Italians; in the mountainous interior to the eastward are the Slavs.
The Russian Empire, sown by Vikings, Slavs, and Mongols, has a rich racial flora, including Germans, Poles, Jews, Lithuanians, Letts, Roumanians, Afghans, Tartars, Finns, and scores of others.
Having thus spoken, he smote the barbarian with his sword; but his fortune was tardier than his spirit; for the other smote him back, and he fell dead under the force of the first blow. Thus he was a sorry sight unto the Danes, but the Slavs granted their triumphant comrade a great procession, and received him with splendid dances.
I suspect that the communism of the Internationale is merely the pioneer of Russian nihilism, which will be the common grave of the old races and the servile races, the Latins and the Slavs. If so, the salvation of humanity will depend upon individualism of the brutal American sort. I believe that the nations of the present are rather tempting chastisement than learning wisdom.
Petersburg, could reasonably count upon having behind him possibly 100,000,000 Slavs among his subjects. Moscow and Odessa gave similar demonstrations of good feeling, and it seemed as if, in the event of the Czar's assuming command as generalissimo of all the forces, the wave of enthusiasm would sweep over the whole empire.
At the bottom of his heart he was at one with the radical Pan-German writers, like Lagarde, Treitschke, Mommsen, Naumann and others, who openly declared that the Slavs should be subjugated and the Czechs, as the most courageous and therefore the most dangerous of them, crushed. The Slavs always bitterly opposed the encroachments of Germanism, and saw in it their chief enemy.
The Italian delegates in private interviews showed great bitterness toward the Slavs, who, they declared, had, as Austrian subjects, waged war against Italy and taken part in the cruel and wanton acts attendant upon the invasion of the northern Italian provinces.
There is the original substratum of Slavs, overlaid by Szeklers, Magyars, German immigrants, Wallacks, Rusniacks, Jews, and gipsies. An old German writer has quaintly described the characteristics of these various peoples in the following manner:
The Bulgars, too, assumed the language of the Slavs, and some of their customs. The Bulgars, however, gave their name to the mixed race, and assumed the political supremacy. The analogy I have before suggested of the Norman invasion of England and the Bulgar invasion of Bulgaria generally holds good.
In order to understand fully what is at stake in this war and why the Slavs are so bitterly opposed to the further existence of Austria-Hungary, it is necessary to study the foreign policy of the Central Powers during the past century.
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