same tia, as it must be, attached, it is perfectly obvious that she must also forego the possession of Slavonia and Croatia. The so-called "Triune Kingdom of Dalmatia, Croatia, and Slavonia, occupied, be it observed, by the Serbo-Croatian race that peoples Bosnia and the Principalities, has been hitherto split in two-most conveniently for the German and Magyar Government administrators at Vienna and Pesthby a wedge of Turkish territory. But assuming that, Austria successfully "occupies" and incorporates Bosnia, what was formerly a wall of division between the Slavonic provinces will become a bridge of territory uniting them. Hitherto the Governments of Pesth and Vienna have, by the famous dualistic arrangement, coolly portioned out and shared between them the old Triune Kingdom: Hungary taking Croatia and Slavonia, while Dalmatia fell to Cisleithania. "Divide et Impera," alike with German bureaucrat and Magyar magnate, that has been hitherto the leading principle in controlling the destinies of the Southern Slavs. In the future the natural union between the four provinces of Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, and Bosnia will be too strong for such artificial separation. But supposing the Triune Kingdom, by the addition of Bosnia become quadripertite, is taken by Austria, this arrangement would be hardly less fatal to Magyar aspirations than the other. The Croatian under-kingdom divorced from Hungary, she would lose that which it has been her perpetual ambition to possess a sea-coast. The three Slavonic provinces added to the Austrian half of the Monarchy which holds already Dalmatia de facto, Cisleithania would assume a preponderance intolerable to the Hungarian half of the Dual State. There remains a third alternative, the grouping of these South Slavonic provinces into a third body politic, and their detachment from both Cisand Trans-Leithania. In other words, there remains that last desperate expedient of Austrian statesmen, the re constitution of the Monarchy on a "trial" in place of a dual basis. A pleasant outlook indeed for future Tiszas and Auerspergs—a triple compromise! But stranger events than the incorporation of the German portion of the Empire-of the true Austria-in its natural Fatherland may well have taken place before a Hapsburg monarch reigns as Illyrian king in Agram or Serajevo. At present we are more exclusively concerned with the fate of Bosnia; and the very gravity of the constitutional questions to which its future position in the Monarchy must inevitably give rise may justify us in assuming that some provisional arrangement, such as that with which the inhabitants of the Military Confines are well acquainted, will be continued in the province. Martial law will, in one form or another, be prolonged, perhaps by the very necessities of the case. Bosnia will remain dependent on the War Office at Vienna, and "will become," to quote the pregnant words of an eminent Croat, "an exaggerated version of the Military Frontier." The ultimate settlement cannot indeed be staved off for ever, but measures will be taken which may be supposed to facilitate the ultimate solution in a sense favourable to "Austrian" ideas. What those "ideas" were at the moment of the passage of the Save I have already pretty well indicated. Austria entered Bosnia "to put down the Serbs." That was a policy on which some unity of sentiment could be relied on both among the Magyar rulers of Hungary and the governing circles at Vienna. There was indeed this difference between the Magyar "view" pure and simple, and the Austrian "view" pure and simple. The Magyars hoped, and perhaps believed, that the Monarchy, after successfully employing its forces in reducing the unruly elements of Bosnia and Herzegovina, might see its way to handing them back to the Sublime Porte as a bulwark of Ottoman power which should effectually curb the future aspirations of the Serbian prin cipalities. The iron wedge was to be driven anew into the heart of the Jugo-Slavs. The Military Party at Vienna, on the other hand, though quite at one with the Magyars so far as the inauguration of Anti-Serbian measures was concerned, differed from them in this important particular, that, having got hold of Bosnia, they meant to keep her. They hoped, however, to be able, by occupying Bosnia, to drive an 'Austrian," and not a Turkish, wedge between Serbia and Montenegro. 66 The Catholic dominant faction in Croatia, which, aided and abetted by the Magyar superiors, has distinguished itself during the last two years by its inauguration of a politico-religious persecution of the very considerable Serbian minority resident in the Province, perceived that those in power at Vienna were about to plunge into what, if it succeeded, might be called a 66 "Croatian" policy, and rejoiced accordingly. The idea of the Catholic faction at Agram has been that the whole Triune Kingdom and Bosnia as well might be moulded into a Great Croatia," in the formation of which as good Catholics and loyal subjects of the Hapsburgs they relied at least on support from Vienna. Bosnia, they imagined, might be governed by an alliance between the small Roman Catholic minority of the province with the native Mahometans as against the Serbian majority of the population, and Croatian administrators were to preside over and direct this holy alliance. They believed, not without some show of reason, that the native Mahometan aristocracy, the Begs and Aghas, might easily be won back by the Roman propaganda from the faith of Islâm which their ancestors had accepted as a social necessity. As the Serbs-the Pravoslavs, or members of orthodox Greek Church-representing the great independent traditions of the Southern Slavs, were to be everywhere trodden down, the little Croatian Government, not without many nods of approval from Pesth and Vienna, which in this respect were at one, set itself to "put down" the Serbian nationality under its immediate jurisdiction-the Croatian officials who were to undertake the same work beyond the Save wishing no doubt to get their hands in. Elsewhere I have described some of that flagitious work. Elsewhere I have described-not from vague hearsay, but from personal observation-the shameless neglect of the Serbian refugees from Bosnia who had sought shelter within the limits of Christendom to find by scores of thousands but six feet of Austro-Hungarian soil. Elsewhere I have described the secret denunciations, the mock trials, the illegal imprisonments, to which leading Serbs of the province were subjected, without a possibility of redress, by the agents of a Government which, under the ægis of a sham constitutionalism, has furbished up anew the Inquisition tools of Metternich. For the object in view no means were too vile, no measures too high-handed; but the suppression-no other word will serve -of the Refugee Schools erected by the English ladies, Miss A. P. Irby and Miss Johnston, for the Bosnian children, by an edict of the Governor of the Croatian Military Frontier, the brother, be it observed, of the present Commander-in-Chief of the invading army, must stand alone for its infamy. Nearly two thousand children were turned adrift and cut off from the bread of knowledge by this Catholic Croat and military barbarian, for no other reason than that they were Serbs. But this "Croatian " policy received its death-blow from the hands of the Bosnian Mahometans. When it was found that the Mahometan population of Bosnia obstinately refused to receive the Austrians as benefactors, and preferred to treat them as brigands, the hope of governing Bosnia in an anti-Serbian sense by an alliance between Roman Catholic and Mahometan, dissolved like the baseless fabric of a vision. The effect of the invasion 1 I must refer to my letters in the Manchester Guardian of June 24th and 29th of this year, on "The Politico-Religious Persecution in Croatia," and "The Proclamation of Martial Law in Slavonia.” has indeed in many ways strengthened the position of the Serbian majority of the Bosnian population. The Mahometans have been led to bid for Serbian assistance. The Serbs, though for the most part passively acquiescent for the present, see that when "order of any kind is re-established in Bosnia, what remains of the Mahometan population will be led to link itself with them in common political opposition to the hated Swabian and Magyar. The Austrian "occupation " has indeed had the effect of healing to a great extent the inveterate feud between the Begs and the Serbian Rayahs of the Province. It almost seems now as if the Austrian invaders, the fine political combination having broken down, were determined to ground their usurpation on blood and iron alone. Those not behind the scenes can have no adequate conception of the precautionary measures taken by the Austrian Government to prevent any genuine information of what is taking place from reaching the outside world. Experto crede. When I, in company with the single other representative of the English press, was forced by refinements of "control" such as were never practised even by the Russians, to take leave of head-quarters on the road to Serajevo, the only "Austrian" institution that had been successfully introduced on to Bosnian soil was the "Press Bureau," to whose representative I have already in part introduced the reader. The telegraph lines from Pesth and Vienna have become mere instruments of the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Office, and one at least of the chief agencies for the dissemination of intelligence in England, chronicles nothing but such items as have been already cooked for foreign consumption by the officiose of Vienna. The Times, that used to publish whole telegraphic columns from the Austrian capital, now that political interest centres with the Austrians in Bosnia, has to put off its readers with such paltry scraps and tags of information as have escaped the official scissors. Even the transmission to England of extracts from the Hungarian papers is prohibited by the censors at Vienna ! If in spite of these unscrupulous efforts to gag the public press of Europe and to hoodwink public opinion, we hear through roundabout sources of the wholesale shooting of Mahometan prisoners; of the execution of forty Serbian merchants at a time "on suspicion;" of villages and towns given up to wholesale plunder; of mutiny among the imperial and royal troops, and the decimation of regiments by order of their own commanders ;-if we learn that General Szapary at the defeat of Tuzla lost nearly 5,000 men and two batteries of cannon; or that in his repulse at Bihacs General Zach lost more than double the 700 men given in the official reports;—and if these as well as the most exaggerated reports from Belgrade of Austrian misdoings and disasters find ready credence, the Government of Vienna has only itself to thank. Reticence provokes suspicion, and those who shun the light cannot easily be acquitted of deeds of darkness. The fact is, the statesmen of the Dual Monarchy are beginning to realise that behind the fiery ranks of the Bosnian Begs and their supporters there lurks a passive opposition which they cannot overcome. The first line of the Bosnian defences, if I may so phrase it, is Mahometan, the second line is Serbian. The arms of the first opponents to be encountered are physical, and may be overcome by superior brute force. The arms of the second line of the defence are moral, and cannot be successfully opposed. The Begs, much as we may admire the grandeur of their resistance, are fighting partly, at least, for caste and sectarian privileges. The political opposition of the Serbian population, which will remain even when the military resistance of the Begs is broken down, is based upon the simple rights of man. They claim no exclusive privileges, but they claim that the majority of the Bosnian population should be allowed to chose its own governors. They claim a right to unite themselves to the other portions of their own people. They consider that national traditions that have survived four centuries of alien bondage justify them, at the very moment when their liberation seemed to dawn, in refusing allegiance to another foreign sovereign, and declining a sham citizenship in another foreign state, whose imperial crown ranks in point of antiquity with that of Brazil. The Serbs, for reasons partly indicated, have chosen to bide their time; but the impartial observer must see in them, and in them alone, those who hold the future of Illyria in their hands. The little free principality, Danubian Serbia, has of late received scant justice from English critics. The resistance offered to the Turks during the first Serbian war was far more gallant than it has been described; indeed no less a personage than Midhat Pasha remarked to General Ignatieff that Europe had entirely underrated the powers of resistance displayed by the Principality. The fact that the Turks, with a total invading army of over 170,000 men, only advanced a few miles in as many weeks into Serbian territory cannot be explained away, as some have sought to do, by Turkish fear of provoking Russian intervention. The Turks, as afterwards became manifest, were quite equal to the feat of daring Russia and all Europe into the bargain. The Serbians were in truth grossly exploited by the drunkard Tchernaieff, and his Russian boon companions, who, in order that they might play the game of the Moscow committee, and render the intervention of official Russia inevitable, resigned position after position to the Turks. Serbia was damned in England by an accident of "Special Correspondence"; but a death-tale of 40,000 is not the death-tale of a nation of poltroons. But behind and beyond the small Principality extends a greater Serbia, bound together by undying traditions as well as by language and blood. Not only Montenegro, but Bosnia, Herzegovina, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, and the old Voivodina in Hungary belong to the Serbian race area; although in the Triune Kingdom the prevalence of the Roman Catholic religion forbids us to call the majority of the population Serbs in the present political sense, which often confines the term to Pravoslavs. Beyond this area the Wends or Slovenes of Carinthia, Carniola, and a good part of Styria are closely allied to the Serbian race in language and political aspirations. The Catholic Croats only, although belonging to precisely the same race as the Serbs, hold for the present aloof from those political aims which to-day are stirring these other South Slavonic populations to their depths, and which centre round the Serbs as the most powerful of the Jugoslav peoples. There never was a more signal instance of political infatuation than when Count Andrassy despatched the troops of the Monarchy into Bosnia "to put down the Serbs." Austrian occupation with all its sanguinary accompaniments, may yet be useful. I have never wished to gainsay that. It may be useful even as paving the way for the break-up of that heterogeneous Empire, and its ultimate re-distribution in such a form that patriotism may again become a possible virtue among those who are to-day its subjects. It may be useful as cutting off the last shred of connexion between Bosnia and the corruption of Stamboul. It may be useful as probably the only possible means at hand to break the still half feudal domination of the Mahometan ruling caste in Bosnia. It may be useful, even, as paving the way for future liberties. But a government which is not a nation cannot give them, cannot secure them. It is not for Austria-Hungary to reap the fruits of her exertions. Her military might is great. Let her occupy her new Lombardy by all means. attempting, as she seems resolved to do, to stamp out the spirit of Serbian nationality, she is attempting something beyond the power of her arms. She will find the Mahometan as well as the Pravoslav element, both alike But in Serbian by blood, linked together in opposition against the Croatian bureaucrats by whose means she vainly hoped to Austrianize the province. The spirit of nationality awakened now among all Serbian and potentially Serbian peoples is indeed in its way one of the most striking phenomena to be found in modern Europe. There occurs to me a little orphan child of nine years, a Bosnian Serb, who, with his little sister and parents, had fled across the Dalmatian border from the Mahometan Terror. The little lad and his sister, who both displayed a sin gular talent for music, had learnt to sing the national songs and to play the ghuzla or Serbian lyre, and as both their father and mother died with thousands of others of the hunger disease on Austrian soil, I suppose it was only their sweet tongues and nimble fingers that saved the little ones from the same grave. The small orphan had been found by Miss Irby in the mountain village, where hundreds of refugees were congregated, and taken to her school at Knin, where I saw him and heard him play. The "little minstrel "-Mali Pievatz, the Bosnians knew him by no other name-who had a ghuzla given him not too big for his small hands, sat down on a stool and played and sung a lay of Marko Kraljevich, the old Serbian hero, that had been taught him by his father. He sang with a clear, fine voice and singular expression, his pretty boyish face completely wrapped in the lay he sang, his keen eyes gazing beyond the listeners into another world -peopled with no visionary heroes; and as he rehearsed the mighty deeds of Serbian forefathers against the Turks his small face flushed with suppressed excitement, and his eyes, bright as those of a young falcon, flashed with all the pride of a great ancestry. When he had finished Miss Irby asked him what was most thought of in Bosnia-meaning what song. The boy, misunderstanding the question, replied decisively, "Heroes!" I do not hesitate to say that those old Serbian heroes and those national traditions of bygone freedom and unity which even little children serve to keep alive among the Bosnian people, excite a devotion against which the artificial Monarchy of the Hapsburgs has nothing to oppose. The bones of Dushan may yet work more miracles than the living arm of Francis Joseph. The Spirit of Nationalitythe self-consciousness which makes a people a people-the self-confidence which enables a nation to read the prophecies of its future in the sublime traditions of its past-the self-knowledge which enables it to choose for itself a government in conformity with its true genius-that Spirit without which a body politic, under whatever government, must degenerate into a machine-will triumph yet in Eastern Europe. There may be renegade Englishmen who oppose in the Balkan peninsula the realisation of the very principles of nationality whose triumph they hailed in Italy and Germany; who would sign and seal the partition of a Southern Poland, and link, as far as in them lay, the destinies of their country with those of the most artificial and pettily tyrannical Power on the Continent of Europe, in order, it would seem, to secure the eventual triumph of a Power, tyrannical indeed, but not artificial. But the Spirit of Nationality which the Serbs have, which the Austrians have not, will survive their machinations. As I wrote on the eve of the Austrian entry into Bosnia so I now repeat. The artificial government of a Monarchy which cannot even call itself by a single name, is powerless against a nationality which has its stronghold in the hearts of peoples striving after union. No diplomatic jugglery, no constitutional makeshifts, no show of military might, no laws, no police regulations, can avail such a government to crush out a nationality which finds its best propaganda, not in Jesuit intrigues, not in an anti-national system of education and an inspired press, but in a thousand heroic lays and on the chords of the Serbian lyre. 82 ARTHUR J. EVANS. |