these leaders, the nation turned
to its clergy who in order to retain their hold on the peasantry must
needs ever remain national. But here again the misfortune which awaited
the Jugo-Slavs was that historically three religions had taken deep
root, the Catholic among the Slovenes and Croats, and the Mohammedan and
Orthodox among the Serbs. We may therefore conclude the first half of
the historical evolution of the Jugo-Slavs with the observation that
political, economic, social, and geographical divisions led to their
downfall as a nation and that if they ever desired to become one, each
one of these chasms would have to be bridged. A solution for each of
these problems--the most difficult which ever faced a nation--would
have to be found; meanwhile the policy of the four masters, the German,
Venetian, Magyar, and Turk, would always be "divide and rule," in other
words, to perpetuate the divergencies.

II

The history of the evolution of the Jugo-Slavs from the sixteenth to the
twentieth century has been an effort to find the means of melting down
these differences until finally one--nationalism--accomplished the
purpose. Unity came first in the imagination and the mind, next in
literature and speech, and finally in political action. The four hundred
years beginning with the fifteenth and ending with the eighteenth
century will be remembered by the Jugo-Slavs as the age of humiliation.
Only Slavicized Ragusa and indomitable Montenegro kept alive the
imagination of the nation which was brought back to life by the
half-religious, half-national Slovene poets of the sixteenth century, by
the Ragusan epic poet [Gundulic], by the incessant demands of successive
diets of the ever-weakening Croatia in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, and by the progressive and zealous Serbs of Hungary, who ever
since the fifteenth century in increasing numbers made their home there,
refugees from the oppression of the Turk, but who ever longed to push
out from the frontier and rebuild Serbia anew. [Krizanic], a Croat
Catholic Dalmatian priest, a firm believer in Jugo-Slav and Slavic unity
in general, appealed to the rising Russian empire to help save dying
Slavdom.

While the Turkish and the Venetian empires decayed, the Austrian and the
Russian gained courage. By the end of the seventeenth century the house
of Habsburg had won back all except the Banat and in the eighteenth
century aspired to divide the Balkan peninsula in halves