that
would some day become payable. When the wars of the seventies were
over, an edict was issued, and from end to end of the country, so goes
the story, men had to sell their sheep and cattle and horses, their
sticks of furniture, their land itself, to meet their obligations.
Meanwhile the Austrian frontiers had been closed. No selling was
possible outside the land, and selling within it was only permitted to
certain specified persons, agents of the Prince, and at fixed prices.
The profits were enormous; the country was ruined, and from that time
date the great emigrations to America, as was pointed out by Mr.
Leiper the Serb-speaking Scot in his admirable contributions to the
_Morning Post_.... Nikita loved to bestow things upon himself. A
famous hero, Novak Voujo[vs]evi['c], killed seventeen Turks in one
day, and when he went, in consequence of an invitation, to Petrograd,
the Tzar presented him with a sword on which were the Russian crown
and the Montenegrin crown in diamonds. When the old warrior came back
to Cetinje, Nikita said that such a weapon could not possibly be worn
by a simple man; he therefore abstracted the diamonds and gave it him
with false ones in their place. Nikita could not endure criticism, but
those persons, including myself, who have charged him with inhuman
treatment in the case of Vladimir Tomi['c], an intelligent young
judge, were acting on faulty information. The tale was that Tomi['c],
after being incarcerated, was soused with petrol and so badly burned
that he lost his reason. As a matter of fact, this neurasthenic young
man--whose imprisonment was due to his having wantonly insulted the
whole Royal Family--poured the petrol on himself. Eventually, when
Radovi['c] came into office, he was released and, a few years later,
he died in his native village.... The Montenegrin records are crowded
with the names of those whom Nikita drove into exile for no other
reason than that they had gone abroad for an education and would no
longer be disposed to regard his methods as quite up to date. With the
exception of the few favoured families Nikita was all against anyone
acquiring riches; he deliberately put obstacles in the way of plum
cultivation, and in such a state of poverty did he keep the
Montenegrins that the Baron d'Estournelles de Constant, whose official
connection with Montenegro dates back to 1878, addressed to Nikita an
open letter with reference to the decreasing population, as to which