towards the Adriatic
that the gaze of the Serbs was directed, to the coast which was ethnically
Serbian and could legitimately be considered a heritage of the Serb race.

Macedonia was also taken into account, schools and armed bands began their
educative activity amongst those inhabitants of the unhappy province who
were Serb, or who lived in places where Serbs had lived, or who with
sufficient persuasion could be induced to call themselves Serb; but the
principal stream of propaganda was directed westwards into Bosnia and
Hercegovina. The antagonism between Christian and Mohammedan, Serb and
Turk, was never so bitter as between Christian and Christian, Serb and
German or Magyar, and the Serbs were clever enough to see that Bosnia and
Hercegovina, from every point of view, was to them worth ten Macedonias,
though it would he ten times more difficult to obtain. Bosnia and
Hercegovina, though containing three confessions, were ethnically
homogeneous, and it was realised that these two provinces were as
important to Serbia and Montenegro as the rest of Italy had been to
Piedmont.

It must at this time be recalled in what an extraordinary way the Serb
race had fortuitously been broken up into a number of quite arbitrary
political divisions. Dalmatia (three per cent. of the population of which
is Italian and all the rest Serb or Croat, preponderatingly Serb and
Orthodox in the south and preponderating Croat or Roman Catholic in the
north) was a province of Austria and sent deputies to the Reichsrath at
Vienna; at the same time it was territorially isolated from Austria and
had no direct railway connexion with any country except a narrow-gauge
line into Bosnia. Croatia and Slavonia, preponderatingly Roman Catholic,
were lands of the Hungarian crown, and though they had a provincial
pseudo-autonomous diet at Agram, the capital of Croatia, they sent
deputies to the Hungarian parliament at Budapest. Thus what had in the
Middle Ages been known as the triune kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia, and
Dalmatia, with a total Serbo-Croat population of three millions, was
divided between Austria and Hungary.

Further, there were about 700,000 Serbs and Croats in the south of Hungary
proper, cast and north of the Danube, known as the Banat and Ba[)c]ka, a
district which during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was
the hearth and home of Serb literature and education, but which later
waned in importance in that respect as independ