ilable for small ships
only, and behind all three there is a barrier of mountains. All of
them, moreover, suffer from the visitations of the bora, which blows
from the north sometimes for weeks on end. Having pointed out their
own necessities and all these limitations, the Magyars stayed at
Rieka. But they cast about them for some means by which the
inconvenient Croats could be countered, and of course the simplest
plan was to protect, as Austria was doing in Dalmatia, that small
party of the Slavs on whom the presence of a few Italians at Rieka and
their knowledge of this language and perhaps their education at some
school in Italy had made such a profound impression that they wished
no longer to be looked upon as Slavs--and some of them quite honestly
thought that they were not Slavs. Of such was the Autonomist party,
whose sole purpose was to flourish at Rieka in alliance with
Hungarians and to keep Rieka a free Hungarian town. Perhaps the
Magyars had no choice of methods, but it does not look magnanimous to
plant yourself in some one else's house and then proceed to make
conspiracies with a disgruntled child. They succoured the Autonomists
in every way. For instance, the Croats had, as elsewhere on the coast,
been so unjustly kept from having schools. The two or three schools in
existence were for those who turned their back on national ambitions
and cultivated modern Italian, even as the nobles up at Zagreb had
cultivated Latin. Now in 1838 the Croats of Rieka, who--it is needless
to say--were much the more numerous part of the population, thought
that Gaj's wonderful educational movement, which was spreading far and
wide, should not find Rieka unresponsive. So they asked that the
Croatian language should be taught, as well as the Italian, in the
local schools. "This was the first attempt," says Mr. Edoardo
Susmel,[41] who is, I gather, a schoolmaster or an ex-schoolmaster at
Rieka. "But the people of Rieka," he says, "always with admirable
tenacity resisted the brute force with which the Croats wanted to
impose on the Italian city the rights of him who is strongest. The
city arose as one man against this first attack and the schools
remained Italian."

The conflict in the Croatian Diet between the National party and that
of the Magyarones grew in violence. The latter, egged on from
Buda-Pest, demanded in the most peremptory fashion that the Croat
deputies should henceforward speak in Magyar instead of Latin. It w