the saucy Croats asked for schools--as indeed their numbers
entitled them to do--well, they would receive no reply. ("Show me a
single Croat school!" cried the Italian mayor triumphantly to me in
1919.) The Magyars spent vast sums on the harbour, making the other
little harbours of Croatia obsolete, and they were not going to lose
their grip of the town for want of proper legislation. They were
surprised that more "regnicoli" (Italians from Italy) did not respond;
but the renegades made up for them. "Passionate and justified," said
Mr. Hilaire Belloc in 1919,[52] is Italian feeling with respect to
Fiume. But this writer, who says he travelled to the Adriatic with a
view to ascertaining the real facts, did not altogether waste his
time, since one of his two adjectives is quite correct. With regard to
the renegades no questions were ever asked, if only one helped to keep
Rieka from the Croats, if, for example, on a voting paper for the
Croatian Diet one put the word "nessuno" (no one). Mr. Susmel, I see,
says that the Diet's continued invitation to the town that it should
send its deputies to Zagreb was a display of "incredible obstinacy."

AND THE SLOVENES ARE COERCED

The _Ausgleich_ was of ill-omen to the Slav subjects of Hungary. It
was not much more auspicious for the Slovenes, Istrians and
Dalmatians. The Slavs seem to have been the Habsburgs' nightmare. Why
the million and a quarter of Slovenes--people who do not approach the
Basques, for instance, in pugnacity--should be the butt of everlasting
coercion and repression may seem inexplicable. When the
German-Austrians of Triest, even after the Italians in Italy had begun
to claim the town, allied themselves with the Triest Italians "to
fight," as they declared, "the common enemy," it can surely not have
been these quiet Slovenes who had won for themselves by great industry
a place in the town which is situated in their province. The "common
enemy" to whom the German-Austrians referred must have been Russia.
And so the Southern Slavs of the Balkans and of the Adriatic owed part
of the bad treatment they received not to their own vices but to the
organizing virtues which their larger brother was supposed to have.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 36: _Memorie per la storia degli arvenimenti che
seguirono in Dalmazia la caduta della Republica veneta_, by
G. Cattalinich, 1841.]

[Footnote 37: This is perpetuated by the initial letters of
the saying