ian
(or Croatian), even to-day only number one and a half million, and do not
enter into this narrative, as they have never played any political role in
the Balkan peninsula.

The Serbs and the Croats were, as regards race and language, originally
one people, the two names having merely geographical signification. In
course of time, for various reasons connected with religion and politics,
the distinction was emphasized, and from a historical point of view the
Serbo-Croatian race has always been divided into two. It is only within
the last few years that a movement has taken place, the object of which is
to reunite Serbs and Croats into one nation and eventually into one state.
The movement originated in Serbia, the Serbs maintaining that they and the
Croats are one people because they speak the same language, and that
racial and linguistic unity outweighs religious divergence. A very large
number of Croats agree with the Serbs in this and support their views, but
a minority for long obstinately insisted that there was a racial as well
as a religious difference, and that fusion was impossible. The former
based their argument on facts, the latter theirs on prejudice, which is
notoriously difficult to overcome. Latterly the movement in favour of
fusion grew very much stronger among the Croats, and together with that in
Serbia resulted in the Pan-Serb agitation which, gave the pretext for the
opening of hostilities in July 1914.

The designation Southern Slav (or Jugo-Slav, _jug_, pronounced yug, =
_south_ in Serbian) covers Serbs and Croats, and also includes Slovenes;
it is only used with reference to the Bulgarians from the point of view of
philology (the group of South Slavonic languages including Bulgarian,
Serbo-Croatian and Slovene; the East Slavonic, Russian; and the West
Slavonic, Polish and Bohemian).

In the history of the Serbs and Croats, or of the Serbo-Croatian race,
several factors of a general nature have first to be considered, which
have influenced its whole development. Of these, the physical nature of
the country in which they settled, between the Danube and Save and the
Adriatic, is one of the most important. It is almost everywhere
mountainous, and though the mountains themselves never attain as much as
10,000 feet in height, yet they cover the whole country with an intricate
network and have always formed an obstacle to easy communication between
the various parts of it. The result of this has bee