THE YUGOSLAVS--10. DR. TRUMBI['C]'S
PROPOSAL--11. THE POSITION IN 1921: THE TIRANA GOVERNMENT AND THE
MIRDITI--12. SERBIA'S GOOD INFLUENCE--13. EUROPEAN MEASURES AGAINST THE
YUGOSLAVS AND THEIR FRIENDS--14. THE REGION FROM WHICH THE YUGOSLAVS
HAVE RETIRED--15. THE PROSPECT--(_b_) THE GREEK FRONTIER--(_c_) THE
BULGARIAN FRONTIER--(_d_) THE ROUMANIAN FRONTIER: 1. THE STATE OF THE
ROUMANIANS IN EASTERN SERBIA--2. THE BANAT--(_e_) THE HUNGARIAN
FRONTIER--(_f_) THE AUSTRIAN FRONTIER--(_g_) THE ITALIAN FRONTIER.

INTRODUCTION

Nobody could have expected in the autumn of 1918 that the frontiers of
the new State would be rapidly delimitated. Ethnological, economic,
historic and strategical arguments--to mention no others--would be
brought forward by either side, and the Supreme Council, which had to
deliver judgment on these knotty problems, would be often more
preoccupied with their own interests and their relation to each other.
It would also happen that a member of the Supreme Council would be
simultaneously judge and pleader. The mills of justice would therefore
grind very slowly, for they would be conscious that the fruit of their
efforts, evolved with much foreign material clogging the machinery and
with parts of the machinery jerked out of their line of track, would be
received with acute criticism. When more than two years had elapsed from
the time of the Armistice a considerable part of Yugoslavia's frontiers
remained undecided. We will travel along the frontier lines, starting
with that between Yugoslavs and Albanians.

(a) THE ALBANIAN FRONTIER

1. THE ACTORS

Those who in old Turkish days lived in that wild border country which is
dealt with on these pages would have been surprised to hear that they
would be the objects of a great deal of discussion in the west of
Europe. But in those days there was no Yugoslavia and no Albania and no
League of Nations, and very few were the writers who took up this
question. It is, undoubtedly, a question of importance, though some of
these writers, remembering that the fate of the world was dependent on
the fraction of an inch of Cleopatra's nose, seem almost to have
imagined that it was proportionately more dependent on those several
hundred kilometres of disputed frontier. It would not so much matter
that they have introduced a good deal of passion into their arguments if
they had not also exerted some influence on influential men--and this
compels one to pay them what