The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 | Page 8

intrigues, continued to pull the two States now this way and now that, and all too frequently against each other. It can thus not be a matter of surprise if the rather inexperienced statesmen of those little countries fell into line with the two Great Powers and spent a good deal of their energies in assailing each other. So blind, alas! were these statesmen that all the tears of St. Petka would not have cured them, and now the two kindred people, so progressive in many ways, are--to speak of each people as a whole--further apart than when their shaggy forefathers came over the Carpathians. It has been the fate of the Yugoslavs--Slovenes, Croats, Serbs and Bulgars--to live for centuries beside each other and be kept always, by foreign masters, isolated from each other. At rare intervals, as we shall see in following their history, a person has arisen who has tried, with altruistic or with selfish motives, to make some sort of union of the Yugoslavs. And now we will go back to the time when Slavs first wandered westward to the Balkans.

I
GLORY AND DISASTER
ARRIVAL OF THE SOUTHERN SLAVS--THEIR UNFORTUNATE DEMOCRATIC WAYS--TWO EARLY STATES--ECCLESIASTICAL ROCKS--THE SLAVS AND THEIR NEIGHBOURS--SIMEON THE BULGAR--WHAT ARE THE BULGARS?--STEPHEN NEMANIA--THE SLOVENES ARE SUBMERGED--THE FATE OF THE CROATS--THE GLORY OF DUBROVNIK--A GALLANT REPUBLIC--THE GLORIOUS DU[vS]AN--EVIL DAYS AND THE PEOPLE'S HERO--THE "GOOD CHRISTIANS" OF BOSNIA--KOSSOVO--GATHERING DARKNESS.
ARRIVAL OF THE SOUTHERN SLAVS
The Slavs who in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries came down from the Carpathian Mountains were known, until the ninth century, as Slovenes (Sloventzi);[4] and if, as is natural, the Serbs and Croats wish to preserve their time-honoured names, they will perhaps agree to call their whole country by the still more ancient name of Slovenia, instead of the merely geographical and not wholly popular term Yugoslavia. Considering that this name (Slovenija) found favour in the eyes of their great Emperor Stephen Du[vs]an, one would imagine that the Serbs might adopt it in preference to the cumbrous "Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes," with its unlovely abbreviation into three letters of the alphabet. The Croats would be glad of this solution, and thus the Yugoslavs would, unlike their relatives the Russians, the Poles and the Czechs, have the satisfaction of living in a country called Slovenia, the land of the Slavs.... But, although this would be a happy solution, it seems much more probable that eventually the name Yugoslavia will be adopted. Everyone is agreed that one inclusive word, answering to Britain and British, is necessary. "Evo na[vs]ih!" ["Here are our men!"] were the words used by the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes as their troops marched past them in Paris during the Allied celebration of July 1919. The Serbian Colonel of the Heiduk Velko regiment, which was stationed at Split in 1920, and of which the other officers were chiefly Croats, the men Moslem and Catholic, used in his public addresses to speak of "Our kingdom." There are various objections to the word Yugoslavia; in the first place, it was introduced by the Austrians, who did not wish to call their subjects Serbs and Croats; in the second place, the term is a literal translation from the German and is against the laws of the Serbo-Croatian language. Another, and more important objection, is that the Bulgars, though Yugoslavs, are not included in Yugoslavia; and perhaps the name will be officially adopted when the Bulgars join the other Southern Slavs.
THEIR UNFORTUNATE DEMOCRATIC WAYS
These Southern Slavs did not display the same genius for organization as the Germanic peoples or the Magyars at the period of their respective migrations. In communities of brethren (or bratsva, from the word brat, a brother) they had not raised up a king; but as a compensation they possessed a lofty moral code, a religion inspired by the worship of nature and by the principle of the immortality of the soul. Occupying themselves with agriculture and the rearing of cattle, it was not until they came into contact, that is to say hostile contact, with their more organized neighbours that they were compelled to join together under the authority of a prince, a knez. The bad result of this profoundly democratic spirit was that the Slavs, not knowing how to keep united, fell under the yoke of other nations. From the interesting series of documents, Latin, Arabic, Byzantine and others, which have been collected in Monimenta Sclavenica by Miroslav Premrou, notary public at Caporetto, and published in 1919 at Ljubljana (Laibach), we can see that the Slovenes occupied a much greater extent of territory than do their descendants of our day--"ab ortu Vistul? ... per immensa spatia ..." (cf. Jordanis de orig. Goth. c. 5)--to beyond the Tagliamento, and from the Piave (cf. Ibrahim Ibn-Jakub[5]) to the Adriatic, the ?gean and the Black