ld Landtag days--apart from his advocacy of the peasants, he
loves to speak. In two hours he would traverse the whole gamut of human
thought, expressing opinions to which John Hampden and Jack Cade and
Montaigne and Machiavelli would in turn assent. The words used to rush
from his lips in a torrent, while to many of his faithful peasant
followers he seemed, throughout his discourse, to be in direct contact
with the Almighty. Next to the Almighty the Croatian peasant had been
taught to revere Francis Joseph, so that when the heir to the throne
was murdered in 1914 it was not very difficult to make the Croat
peasants rise against this sacrilege by plundering the Serbian shops at
Zagreb--Austrian officers coming with their children to look on--just as
in other parts of Croatia and Bosnia. There is as yet within the Croat
peasant a certain hostility against the Serb and for various reasons:
one of them is that he was always taught by Austria to detest the
adherents of the Orthodox religion, another reason is that for centuries
they have had a different culture; and so, since Austria's collapse,
when it has been explained to them what is a republic and what is a
monarchy, they have often demanded the former for no better reason than
that the Serbs prefer the latter. They were taught by Austria to look
forward to a Greater Croatia, which would eliminate the Slovenes by
delivering them to the Germans, for that celebrated corridor to the
Adriatic. And it is from the Slovene Socialists that the peasants of
Croatia might very profitably learn.... The Slovene influence, coming
from a more highly organized province, would be beneficial both for
Serbs and Croats, for the industrial workers and for the peasants. The
nature of the Southern Slavs, say these Socialists, is democratic, and
the State mechanism might be made more so. Now that the various parts of
Yugoslavia have liberated or are liberating themselves from various
yokes, they have approached one another with a different mentality; they
will become much better known to one another. And it was hoped that when
Mr. Radi['c] regained his freedom and his book-shop he would find that
his devotees preferred to hear him not as a Croat Jack Cade but as a
Yugoslav Hampden. In his absence the party was leaderless.

As for the other Croats, only Frank's Clerical party, which numbered
five or six deputies, and did not hide its persistent sympathies with
the House of Habsburg, kept up Sepa