FOOTNOTES:
[50] J. Ellis Barker, “The Ultimate Fate of Austria-Hungary,” in The Nineteenth Century, vol. 76 (2), p. 1006.
[51] H. Wickham Steed, The Habsburg Monarchy, p. 8.
[52] Cited in Chéradame, L’Europe et la question d’Autriche, p. 3.
[53] Cited in The New Europe, ii, pp. 30, 227.
[54] Francis Gribble in The Nineteenth Century, vol. 82 (2), pp. 883-884.
[55] Declaration of the Czecho-Slovak National Council, Sept. 19, 1918, cited from the Journal des Débats, weekly edition, Oct. 25, 1918.
[56] The Hungarian census of 1910 claimed that the Magyars in the lands of the Crown of St. Stephen numbered 10,050,575.
VII
HUNGARY AND THE ADRIATIC
Among all the states of Europe there are few which, from the historical, the geographic, or the economic point of view, might appear to have a better claim to existence than the thousand-year-old kingdom of Hungary. Nature would seem to have marked out for political unity this Pannonian basin, with its marvellously fertile plain of the Alföld in the centre, surrounded on almost every side by mountain walls and mineral-bearing highlands, with its roads and rivers all converging towards the great Danube waterway, and its various parts supplementing each other economically in so admirable a fashion. And here, for once, history and geography did not seem to be working at cross-purposes. Ever since the appearance of those gifted and valiant Asiatics, the Magyars, in the Danubian plain in the ninth century, the Pannonian basin has been united into a state which has shown a remarkable vitality and durability, and whose frontiers, in spite of some temporary fluctuations, have on the whole remained singularly unchanged. If ancient status of possession, economic cohesion, and what may be called the geographic fitness of things, were all the factors that need be taken into account, the Hungarian state, in spite of all its misdeeds, ought to have come through the World War intact. Unfortunately for it, however, there is another factor which counts for even more nowadays: the rights and aspirations of peoples.
Hungary has always been a polyglot state. The ruling race, the Magyars, a nation of mixed Finno-Ugrian and Turko-Tartar stock, are a people of the plains like their nomad ancestors. They are said to have a positive aversion for living more than 600 feet above sea level. Hence, except for a few scattered colonies, they have always remained quartered in the plain of the Alföld, leaving the peripheral highlands and the once swampy regions of the south to other races, whom they probably found in the country at the time of their arrival and whose numbers have certainly been increased by subsequent immigration. The Magyars are an island of Asiatics surrounded by a sea of Latins and Slavs.
This ruling race is probably only a minority of the total population. The earliest census of nationalities that we have and the only one that was taken by relatively impartial officials, the census of 1851, makes out the Magyars to be only 37% of the total population. It is true that since the Magyars have taken the census into their own hands, their percentage has risen steadily with each successive decade, until by 1900 they could claim a slight majority, and in 1910 they could boast of 54%. In this latter year they were reckoned at just ten millions, out of a population of eighteen millions for Hungary proper. Their astonishing gains at the expense of the other races were officially explained as due to “the peaceful propagation of Hungarian culture.” Of that “peaceful propagation” I shall speak in a moment; but it should be said here that scarcely any unprejudiced observer accepts Hungarian racial statistics at their face value, and that a more probable estimate would reduce the number of the Magyars to about eight millions. This would make them a minority even in Hungary proper, and much more so in the whole kingdom—i. e., with Croatia included—which had a population of twenty-one millions in 1910.
Among the subject races, the Roumanians probably numbered three to three and a half millions; the Slovaks two to three millions; the Ruthenians half a million; the Serbs and Croats three millions; the Germans two millions.
Like every other racially composite state, Hungary was placed before the gravest of problems by the nineteenth century revival of the submerged or long dormant nationalities. During the early and middle part of that century, this problem could seldom be seriously faced by the Magyars, for they were engaged in their own battle for constitutional rights against the despotic and centralizing policy of Vienna. In this struggle they displayed a vigor and a tenacity which won for them both the sympathy and admiration of the world and a reputation as liberals and democrats which they have since singularly belied. As soon as their victory over the imperial government was sealed by the Compromise of 1867, as soon as they found themselves masters in Transleithania, the Magyars set to work to deny to the other races of the kingdom all those liberties for which they themselves had been fighting. The programme, henceforth pursued with the most relentless rigor and the most unscrupulous methods, was to ‘assure the unity of the Hungarian State’ by Magyarizing the subject races.
One must not be taken in by such mere stage decorations as the Hungarian law of nationalities of 1868—in appearance the most generous measure that could be devised, but never put into practice; nor by the glib phrases of Magyar propagandists about the unparallelled freedom that existed in Hungary, and the zeal with which the government fostered the languages and culture of the non-Magyar races. Anything more insolently defiant of the truth could scarcely be imagined. What has really gone on in Hungary in the past fifty years—what “the peaceful propagation of Magyar culture” meant—is something not easy to condense into a few words. In the briefest summary, however, it includes:
The exclusion of the non-Magyar languages from all state schools, the courts of law, administrative intercourse, and every other kind of official use;
Scandalous violation of the rights of freedom of person, speech, meeting, and association;
Systematic and merciless persecution of every manifestation of non-Magyar national sentiment;
An exaggerated irritability or arrogance of power, which has led Magyar authorities to impose sentences totalling twenty-nine years of imprisonment on a few petitioners who ventured to complain to the Emperor-King; to expel schoolboys or seminarians merely for speaking Roumanian or Slovak in the streets; or to imprison a nursemaid for “conspiring against the state” by allowing a three-year-old child to wear a bow with the Roumanian colors;
The virtual exclusion of non-Magyars from public office;
A parliamentary franchise narrow and complicated beyond description, and so administered as regularly to assure to the Magyar minority all but about 10 of the 413 seats in Parliament, so that the other races were virtually disfranchised;
An unrivalled system of gerrymandering;
Parliamentary elections stained with every form of outrage, fraud, and illegality, with coercion so freely employed that the government itself boasted that at the last elections it had used only 194 battalions of infantry and 114 squadrons of cavalry, and it has often been said that Hungarian elections resembled nothing so much as a civil war.
Such are some of the features of what may fairly be called the most odious system of racial oppression known to modern Europe.
It is, of course, true that this system was the work of the ruling oligarchy—a class which showed itself averse to democratic progress in any form, and which also chastised the Magyar proletariat with whips, even if it reserved its scorpions for the non-Magyars. But that made little practical difference. The cardinal fact was that after standing this sort of thing for fifty years, the subject peoples had come to execrate the very name of Magyar. If a chance for liberation presented itself, then, as some one has said, not even an angel from heaven could have dissuaded them from seizing it.
Hence, during the general débâcle of the Quadruple Alliance in October-November, 1918, Hungary disintegrated almost as spontaneously and easily as Austria. It was in vain that the new republican government of Count Károlyi fought frantically to save the territorial integrity of the state by offering the non-Magyar peoples the widest and most sweeping concessions, going even so far as to propose the transformation of Hungary into a federation of national cantons on the Swiss model. Nothing could make the seceders believe that the Magyar could change his spots, or tempt them back into the cage.
Equally fruitless were the diplomatic or propagandist efforts to persuade the Allied Powers that Hungary had suddenly become a new creation, which could not be held responsible for the acknowledged sins of its former rulers, and ought to be let off intact and scot-free. It is scarcely necessary to enter here into the tangled and not quite edifying relations between the Allies and the various governments that have succeeded each other at Budapest: the genuinely democratic and reforming government of Count Károlyi (October 1918—March 1919); the Bolshevist interlude under Bela Kun (March—August); and the more recent cabinets made up of more or less unsmirched remnants of the old regime. These many changes of government have long delayed the conclusion of peace with Hungary.[57] At all events, the treaty is now apparently about to be signed; and it seems safe to assume that this treaty will embody the territorial arrangements which were decided upon at Paris in the spring of 1919 and which I shall now try briefly to describe.
The northwestern highlands of Hungary, which are inhabited mainly by Slovaks, are to be incorporated into Czecho-Slovakia. This state touches the Danube at one point through the acquisition of Presburg, the one-time capital of Hungary. Regrettable as it may be that so historic a city should be lost to its old owners, it must be said that Presburg was always rather German than Magyar in population; and that it will furnish the land-locked republic of Czechoslovakia with a much-needed port on the Danube and a means of commercial access to the Balkans and the Black Sea.
The half-million Ruthenians who inhabit the mountains of northeastern Hungary form a secluded and backward population which has hitherto been supremely indifferent to the affairs of the outside world. Alone among the races of Hungary, they had no national movement and probably very little consciousness of nationality. Before the War they had not a single school in which their language was taught, no political newspaper of any kind, and scarcely any educated class. What went on in these primitive and illiterate heads when the gospel of self-determination penetrated to them, it is difficult to guess. There are tales that within a very few weeks three so-called National Assemblies were held, each claiming to represent the ‘Carpatho-Ruthenian nation,’ and that these rival gatherings ‘self-determined’ their people, the one for union with Czecho-Slovakia, the second for union with Hungary, and the third for union with their kinsmen over the mountains in Galicia. At any rate, the Czechophile tendency appears to have been the strongest. Going on the best evidence it could get as to the preferences of this enigmatic population, the Peace Conference has decided to attach them to Czecho-Slovakia, though under the form of an autonomous province with generous rights of self-government.
An ideal which has haunted the minds of Roumanian patriots for a century, but which long seemed only an iridescent dream, has been realized by the annexation to Roumania of Transylvania and the adjacent zone of territory on the west. This aspiring kingdom has now very nearly attained the frontiers of Trajan’s province of Dacia; and everyone knows with what ardor the modern Roumanians claim that they are descended from the Roman colonists sent out to Dacia in Trajan’s time.
Contrary to what appears to be widely believed in this country, Roumania’s acquisitions, with the possible exception of some small contentious border districts, are based strictly upon the principle of nationality. They serve to liberate over three millions of Roumanians, who, among all the subject peoples of Hungary, were the race most hated and oppressed by the Magyars, because of their numbers and the tenacity of their patriotism. It is true that in eastern Transylvania several large compact bodies of Magyars and Germans (900,000 of the former, 200,000 of the latter) are now transferred to Roumanian rule. But this is unavoidable in the case of such isolated enclaves. The Germans apparently do not object seriously; and as for the Magyars, it would be impossible to leave them to Hungary without cutting off a far larger number of Roumanians from their mother country. But of all the dramatic changes of fortune in Eastern Europe, there is none more striking than this one, which has put down the mighty Magyars from their seats, and exalted the humble Roumanian, for eight hundred years a slave and an outcast in his own country.
Roumania and Serbia have had an unpleasant controversy over the former Hungarian territory called the Banat of Temesvár. Although this dispute had very nearly brought those two Allied nations to blows, when it was laid before the Peace Conference one distinguished prime minister burst out in an audible whisper, “Where on earth is the Banat?” The Banat lies just southwest of Transylvania. It is the quadrangle enclosed by the Danube, the Theiss, the Máros, and the Transylvanian mountains.
It would take over-long to set forth the arguments, historical, economic, geographic, ethnographic, and miscellaneous, with which the two rivals regaled the Peace Conference. The Conference gave what was, I think, a proof of its wisdom by repeating the judgment of Solomon and dividing the disputed object between the litigants. Roumania will receive the larger portion, most of which is overwhelmingly Roumanian in population. Serbia acquires the very motley western section, in which Serbs, Roumanians, Germans, and Magyars are terribly intermingled, but in which the Serbs are at least a plurality: she acquires a much-needed zone to protect Belgrade on the north and east, and a number of towns which have played so great a rôle in Serbian intellectual movements that they are considered the cradle of the Serb national revival.
Farther to the westward lies the historic kingdom of Croatia, which has for eight hundred years been bound to Hungary by ties which no one could ever quite satisfactorily define, but which have often been compared to the connection between England and Ireland. In the last half century at least, Magyar-Croat relations have been even less serene and amicable than Anglo-Irish ones. It goes almost without saying that Croatia has now, of her own choice, united with Serbia and the Slovene lands of Austria to form the new state popularly called Yugo-Slavia.
That state has also received Bosnia and the Herzegovina, two provinces which have been the Alsace-Lorraine of southeastern Europe ever since their ill-fated occupation by Austria-Hungary in 1878. Thus the unity of the Southern Slav race is very nearly completed.
Here again one is in the presence of another seemingly impossible dream realized. Only ten years ago the Yugo-Slavs were living under six different governments; and their deputies sat in fourteen different parliaments, national or provincial. To attain their unity they have had to disrupt two such empires as Austria-Hungary and Turkey.
Their present union into one state appears to be in every sense natural and desirable. For Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes are blood-brothers, three closely related branches of one family. Serbian and Croatian are virtually the same language, although written, the one in Cyrillic, the other in Latin, characters. If Slovene forms a rather different idiom or even language, it is quite intelligible to the other two peoples. The Southern Slavs, moreover, need to stand together. They occupy an extremely important and a dangerous position; they are the guardians of the gate that leads from Central Europe to Constantinople and Bagdad. For three small peoples, placed in such a position, the motto that “in union there is strength” cannot be too much emphasized.
It is, of course, true that the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes have been politically separated throughout their history, as a result of geography and such accidents as the Turkish, Magyar, and German conquests. It is also true that they have developed considerable differences in customs, grade of culture, and above all in religion. The Serbs are Orthodox; the Croats and Slovenes Catholics; and there are in Bosnia about 600,000 people who, though Serbs in race, are Mohammedans. In this new ménage, made up indeed of brothers, but of brothers who have all their lives been separated, it is only to be expected that there will be a certain amount of domestic friction. Nevertheless, I think the reunion of the family, which the Peace Conference sanctioned and indeed worked for, is to be considered one of the greatest gains effected by the World War.
To sum up, Hungary has lost more than half of her area and population. She is reduced to the lowland region around Budapest, which has always been the real home of the Magyar; she now has a population of only eight to nine millions. It is to be regretted that she has lost almost all her forests, her mineral wealth, her mountain sources of water-power, her access to the sea.
TERRITORIES OF FORMER AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE
Grievous as her fate may be, it can scarcely be called unmerited. Louis Kossuth, the idol of the modern Magyars, answering a deputation sent by the subject peoples in 1848 to plead for their national rights, retorted, “No, let the sword decide between us.” And that remained the attitude of this race, whose greatest patriot declared that ‘pride would be their ruin.’ One cannot forget that this was a Magyar, as well as a German, war; and that, as some one has said, ‘it was provoked by a ring of Magyar politicians who had mortgaged their very souls to the German cause in order to purchase a free hand for the oppression of the non-Magyars.’[58]
But one would prefer to regard the settlement of the Hungarian problem made at Paris not as a matter of retributive justice, but rather as a sweeping application of the principle of nationality in the region where that principle had been most trampled upon; as the only kind of settlement in any way acceptable to those peoples who were in the majority in the old Hungarian state; and therefore as the only plan that could restore peace to this sorely distracted part of Europe.
I now pass to the questions concerning the territories on the Adriatic coast, part of which formerly belonged to Austria and part to Hungary. All of these territories are in dispute between Italy and Yugo-Slavia; and their problems taken together make up the so-called Adriatic question, which among all the problems that the Peace Conference has had to face has shown itself the most delicate, difficult, and interminable.
The Adriatic question relates mainly to the following five territories:
(1) The province or ‘crownland’ of Gorizia and Gradisca; (2) Trieste; (3) Istria; (4) Dalmatia—these four all formerly parts of Austria; and (5) Fiume, which belonged to Hungary. In addition some small bits of the provinces of Carinthia and Carniola have been involved in the dispute.
All these territories have a certain geographic unity. They form a long, narrow fringe of coastland and islands, rigidly separated from the Yugo-Slav hinterland by the successive chains of the Julian Alps, the Karst, the Velebite Mountains, and the Dinaric Alps. These ranges, which are the continuation of the Italian Alps, seem to detach the eastern coast of the Adriatic from the world beyond the mountains and to orient it towards the opposite western shore, of which it appears to be, in many respects, only an extension. Indeed, in its climate, its physical aspect, its vegetation; in the customs and mode of life of its inhabitants; its seafaring and commercial activities, and its age-long reliance upon communications by water rather than by land, this littoral region resembles Italy much more than the Balkans.
History has conformed to this aspect of geography. Not only did Rome long hold the whole eastern coast and plant there Latin colonies and a Latin tongue which, in some spots at least, seem never to have disappeared; but Venice succeeded to the inheritance of Rome, and from the tenth century to the end of the eighteenth imposed her sway over a large part of the eastern littoral and the islands. The Slavs had, indeed, penetrated to the coast or near it, in the seventh century; and ever since it may be assumed that the bulk of the population in almost every province on this coast has been of Slavic stock. Nevertheless, the Italians remained the dominant race in every respect save numbers; theirs was the language of business, of politics, of society, of literature, the language which almost everyone understood and tried to speak, if he pretended to be anybody; Italian was the civilization which has left such splendid monuments in the duomi and palazzi, the loggie and the campanili, which adorn the coast cities from Trieste to Ragusa. It is no great exaggeration when Italians today talk of eighteen centuries of Italianità in the lands east of the Adriatic. Nor is it strange that in Dalmatia, with her vines and olives, laurels and cypresses, and here and there a palm; with her warm Mediterranean sun and ever-present vistas of blue waters; with her cities studded with Roman and Venetian remains, and the lion of San Marco guarding every older edifice; the present-day Italian should feel himself very much in his own country.
But the nineteenth century revivals of dormant nationalities have brought cruel trials to the defenders of historic civilizations. Since the middle of that century, the Adriatic lands have seen a bitter conflict between the resurgent Croats and Slovenes, who are in most cases the majority, and the Italians. This conflict has been complicated and envenomed by the insidious and sometimes violent interventions of the Austrian and Hungarian authorities, both anxious to maintain their hold upon the coast by playing off the two chief nationalities of that region against one another. At Fiume the Magyars systematically favored the Italians in order to prevent the control of Hungary’s one port by the Croatians. In the other coastal territories the Austrians generally supported and spurred on the Slavs, who were regarded as less dangerous than the obnoxious nation which had brought Austria to grief in 1859 and 1866. Hence at the present day both of the rival races can say that the natural course of development has been perverted: neither quite likes to accept the ethnographic status quo produced through fifty years of machinations or violence by Vienna and Budapest.
Down to the World War the contest remained pretty much a local one, attracting no great amount of attention from the Italians of the kingdom, or the outside Yugo-Slavs, or the world at large. The other Yugo-Slavs had more pressing problems nearer home. In Italy the Carbonari did, indeed, dream of an ‘Ausonian Republic,’ extending from Malta to the Trentino, and from Trieste to Cattaro; and such seems also to have been the ideal of Daniel Manin and other heroes of 1848. All Italians agreed that Gorizia, Trieste, and Istria belonged by nature to Italy as much as did the Trentino or Venetia. But Dante, in a much quoted passage, had described the eastern side of Istria as the natural limit of Italy: he had spoken of the
“Quarnaro che Italia chiude.”
Mazzini, the greatest Italian political thinker of the nineteenth century, had also taken this to be the eastern boundary of Italy, and had spoken in the loftiest terms of the union and fraternity that ought to reign between his countrymen and the Yugo-Slavs. There seems to be no evidence that Cavour thought seriously of claiming anything east of the Adriatic—certainly not Dalmatia.
The Italian public thus had no very clear idea as to how much rightfully belonged to their country on the east; and as time wore on after the close of the Risorgimento period, that public more or less forgot about the Italian colonies beyond the Adriatic, or else gave them up as indefensible positions which there could be little hope of saving. Thus the Great War caught both Italians and Yugo-Slavs rather unprepared, and without very definite ideas or clear-cut programmes with respect to the Adriatic question.
It is well known that the Italian government then, rather hastily perhaps, formulated its programme and its demands in the treaty of London, of April 26, 1915—the treaty signed by England, France, and Russia in order to secure Italy’s entry into the War. This treaty promised Italy, in case of victory, a new frontier including the southern Tyrol, all of Gorizia, Trieste, all Istria, northern Dalmatia as far as a line which cuts the coast just west of Traù, and several of the larger Dalmatian islands farther south, including Lissa and Curzola. It did not include Fiume, presumably because the assumption then was that Austria-Hungary would continue to exist after the War as a great power, which must have at least one port on the Adriatic.
This treaty, were it ever to be carried out, would incorporate in Italy about 800,000 Yugo-Slavs, nearly half of whom live in Dalmatia. It inevitably created great resentment at Belgrade and Agram, and helped to produce that regrettable state of relations between Italians and Yugo-Slavs which has had such unfortunate results in the past year. At any rate, during the negotiations of the past year the Italians themselves have elected not to adhere to the strict terms of the treaty of London, but have shown, I think it must be admitted, a genuine willingness to seek a compromise more acceptable to their opponents.
At this point, it becomes necessary to consider the questions at issue, region by region.
Gorizia, Trieste, and Istria are three small territories which, in Roman times, formed a part of Italy and of the province of Venetia, and which the modern Italians still call Venetia Julia. Most scholars will agree, I think, that geographically these territories belong to Italy, and that the Julian Alps and the Karst Mountains, which come down to the sea on the Quarnero, mark the natural frontier of Italy on the northeast.
Historically, Venice held the larger part of Istria and a small part of Gorizia for many centuries down to the fall of the republic in 1797. Trieste was an independent commune until in 1382 it came under Hapsburg rule. The larger part of Gorizia and eastern Istria, after passing for centuries from one German princeling to another, have been under the Hapsburgs since the close of the Middle Ages.
Ethnographically, Venetia Julia seems to show a slight Yugo-Slav majority (52%). In Gorizia there were in 1910 155,000 Slovenes against 90,000 Italians; in Trieste 119,000 Italians against 59,000 Yugo-Slavs; in Istria 203,000 Yugo-Slavs against 147,000 Italians. But the Italians, not without some show of reason, contest these figures as being much too favorable to their opponents, owing to the bias and the unscrupulous methods of the Austrian census-takers. Furthermore, it would be difficult for even an honest census to give an accurate picture of the racial complexities of a province like Istria, which has been said to contain more fragments of diverse nationalities than any other province of similar size in Austria, and fragments that generally do not get properly classified in the census because there is no rubric for them. What is one to do with such ethnographic curios as the Chiches, the Morlaks, the Rumenes of Istria—people who do not know what they are themselves, nor can any philologist tell them? One of the best observers of the region has discovered no less than thirteen “ethnographic nuances,” and such a confusion and intermixture of tongues that even educated people had difficulty in deciding what language they spoke. He found here Croaticized Slovenes, and Slovenized Croats; Croaticized Rumenes, Italianized Croats, and Croaticized Italians; finally a population of whom all that could be said was that their costume was Italian, their manners Slav, and their language a mixture of everything. Under such circumstances one cannot place great reliance on the census.
Perhaps it is more significant that just before the War, out of seventeen deputies elected from these three provinces to the Reichsrat, ten were Italians, and only seven Yugo-Slavs. In the provincial diets the Italians outnumbered the Slavs two to one. Seventy per cent of the communes are said to have had Italian administrations. Italian was indubitably the chief language of business, of administration, of the cities, and of the educated classes pretty generally, the one language that everybody knew and without which it was impossible to get along.
Under these circumstances, it has, in the first place, been settled that Trieste belongs to Italy. Of the Italian character and sentiment of that city throughout its history, there can be no doubt. If the Yugo-Slavs for a time laid claim to it, that was because the rural districts around it are Slovene and because Trieste is the natural port for the Slovene provinces in the interior. Nevertheless, it would appear that the Yugo-Slavs would have been wiser never to raise a claim so obviously doomed to defeat.
It appears probable that the whole of Gorizia and Istria will also go to Italy. This is, of course, a more questionable decision; but, in view of the geographic facts in the case, the solidly Italian population in the coastal districts, the preponderant position of the Italian language and civilization everywhere, and the apparent preponderance of Italian political sentiment as measured by the elections, this would seem to be a not unfair solution.
Much more serious are the problems presented by the remaining two territories: Dalmatia and Fiume.
As to Dalmatia the Yugo-Slav claim can be stated very simply. That province had in 1910 a population of 635,000, of whom 611,000 (96%) were Yugo-Slavs and only 18,000 (3%) Italians. Even if one admits some inaccuracy in these figures, the most extreme Italian claims do not rise above 60,000 (10% of the total population). All the deputies sent from Dalmatia to the Reichsrat for many years back have been Yugo-Slavs, and the latter control every commune in the province, save only the capital Zara. The Yugo-Slav predominance is so overwhelming that, at first glance, it is not easy to understand how the Italians can have any serious claim at all.
The Italians rest their case, in the first place, upon history. They point to the wellnigh eighteen hundred years of Latin rule in Dalmatia: the Roman period, the age of the independent Latin-Dalmatian communes, the long sway of Venice, inaugurated by the famous expedition of 998, in honor of which the Doge ever afterwards bore the title Dux Dalmatiae, and to commemorate which there was instituted the famous annual ceremony of the ‘wedding of the sea’ by Venice.
The Italians do not deny that the great majority of the Dalmatian population has for centuries been of Slavic speech. But they assert that in almost every other respect this population is Italian: in its customs, costumes, games, in its artistic, literary, and musical tastes—even in its cuisine. The whole civilization of the province is Italian. Even as regards language, there is no real barrier: the Slavs are, most of them, bilingual, and even their own dialect is studded with Italianisms.
Thirdly, while admitting that the harmony which long reigned between the two races has, since 1866, given way to bitter enmity, the Italians declare that this was mainly the work of the Austrian government. Now that that influence is removed, and if the church, the school, and the gendarme are no longer used to stir up anti-Italian feeling, many Italians seem to believe that the Dalmatian Slavs could be won back to the old friendly relations and to peaceful acceptance of Italian rule. In any case, can Italy abandon those communities which remained faithful to her even during the period of Austrian persecution—that is, the capital, Zara, and some of the islands?
To understand Italian feelings on this subject, one must recall the long, agonizing, and—in the main—losing fight of the last forty years to save the Italian character of the Dalmatian cities. The struggle turned about control of the municipal councils, for it was they that decided what was to be the official language of the schools and the public services and which nationality was to set the tone and get all the favors in the community. The Austrians seem to have employed every form of corruption, fraud, and violence to sweep the Italians out of the municipalities. It is said that at the elections in Spalato in 1883 all the officials were ordered to vote Croat; the clergy also; a cruiser was sent to overawe the city; the election officials and the soldiery completed the intimidation of the voters; and it was thus that Spalato was lost to the Italians. One after another the other cities succumbed. Cattaro and Ragusa holding out bravely until 1900; and then only one Italian stronghold was left. That is why people in Rome speak of it as ‘Zara Italianissima’—any city that could defend itself so long must have a superlative character about its patriotism; and this is why the Italians have been so anxious to save at least that last bulwark of Latin Dalmatia.
Fourthly, the Italian argument dwells upon the geographic character of the province—shut off from Yugo-Slavia by rough and savage mountains, united to Italy by the sea over which practically all its external communications are carried on. Ratzel declared that Dalmatia lived like an island, and Freeman compared it to a branch cast forth from Italy across the Adriatic.
Finally, the Italians invoke strategic reasons for demanding at least a part of Dalmatia. The Adriatic Sea forms a narrow couloir, about 400 miles in length but in places scarcely 100 miles across. The western coast of that sea, the Italian side, is almost destitute of harbors that could serve as defensive naval bases; while on the eastern side the Dalmatian coast, with its many fine ports, its protecting chains of islands, its labyrinth of back channels and concealed inner basins, offers the most marvellous basis for naval operations. Obviously, the Italian fleet, with its bases at Venice and Pola at one end of the Adriatic and Brindisi at the other, would be at a grave disadvantage as against a naval power planted midway in the couloir in the impregnable strongholds of Dalmatia. And if it is said that Yugo-Slavia is never likely to have such a fleet as would be a serious menace, the Italians reply that even a small fleet of cruisers, lurking in the recesses of the Dalmatian coast, could be a scourge to Italian commerce and to the unprotected coast of Italy only three hours distant; and for submarine bases Dalmatia offers unrivalled advantages, as the World War has shown. Hence, it is argued, Dalmatia is necessary to Italy’s security. Without it, her long and vulnerable flank will remain undefended and indefensible.
I have tried to set forth the Italian side of the Dalmatian question at some length, because it is far less simple and obvious than the Yugo-Slav standpoint. Nevertheless, I am inclined to think that the latter case is the stronger. In view of the overwhelming Yugo-Slav majority and the attitude which, from whatever cause, the Dalmatian Slavs have come to adopt towards the Italians, the assignment of any considerable part of the province to Italy would, I believe, be a grave violation of the principles of the Allies, and a source of endless embarrassments for Italy.
After a year of discussions the Italian government has come to the point where, if it can obtain a satisfactory settlement as to Fiume, it seems willing to drop its claims to Dalmatia, except for a couple of points. For strategical purposes it still demands the island of Lissa, which Mazzini called “the Malta of the Adriatic”—a claim that seems not unreasonable; and it is also apparently asking that Zara should be constituted a free city—which might be of questionable advantage for Zara.
The main contest, then, is over Fiume.
Fiume is a rather small place in proportion to the commotion it has excited in the world—a city of about 50,000 people. Who founded it or when, we do not exactly know. It appears in the later Middle Ages as a small self-governing commune of the Italian type, which in 1465 passed under the suzerainty of the Hapsburgs, and was by them treated as a part of their hereditary Austrian lands until in 1776-79 Maria Theresia, wishing to endow the Magyars with a port of their own, transferred the city to the kingdom of Hungary. Amid all these changes, the ‘Magnificent Community’ of Fiume kept up its self-government and a very strong spirit of local independence. Indeed, down to a few years ago, at least, the only patriotism that the Fiumani knew was an intense love for their own little city. This spirit helped to preserve them from ever falling under the rule of Venice or any other Italian state; and, equally, it led them to fight strenuously at various times against the incorporation of their city in the kingdom of Croatia, which the Diet of Agram was always trying to put through. On the other hand, they long accepted with enthusiasm the union with Hungary, which did not seem to threaten their independence and which brought great economic advantages to their city as the single port of the Magyar kingdom.
As far back as we can trace it, the population of Fiume seems always to have been a mixed one—in part Croatian, in part Italian. It could hardly be otherwise with a city whose hinterland was solidly Croatian, but whose commercial relations were mainly with Italy. Hence it appears that the lower classes of the population were always chiefly Croats, constantly replenished from the country districts, while the upper classes were partly of the one race, partly of the other. But Italian was the language of society, of business, and of government, and to it the citizens were much attached. During the struggles of the period between 1848 and 1867, when annexation to Croatia was always staring them in the face, the municipal authorities again and again petitioned the Emperor not to permit the violation of “the sacred rights of the Italian language,” “the tongue that has been spoken here ever since Fiume existed.” “It would be superfluous,” they declare, “to demonstrate what is universally known, that in Fiume the Italian idiom has for centuries been the language of the school, of the forum, of commerce, of every public and private meeting; in short, it is the language of the community, and one of the chief sources to which it owes its grade of culture and of commercial and industrial progress.”
Two races living together in harmony, untouched by any national feeling, swayed only by love of their city-state, devotion to its time-honored customs, including the use of the Italian language, and zeal for the connection with Hungary, on which their economic prosperity depended—these conditions began to break down after 1867. The great development of the port carried out by the Hungarian government brought in a flood of new citizens—mainly Italians, since the Magyars favored that element. It was at this time that the Italians seem to have gained the numerical preponderance in the city. Then, in the last few decades, the importation of Magyars set in, at such a rate that the Italian ruling class in alarm concluded that the government at Budapest was bent on Magyarizing the city and that their connection with Hungary was not so comfortable after all. Hence there arose a new Italo-Magyar conflict to complicate the struggle that had already broken out between the Italians and the Yugo-Slavs. Now at last the Italian-speaking population began to turn their eyes across the Adriatic for liberators, and the Croat-speaking citizens began to sigh for the Yugo-Slav fatherland.
In the Fiume problem, as it presents itself today, the respective rôles of the Italians and the Yugo-Slavs are just the opposite of what they are in Dalmatia. In the case of Fiume, the Italian argument rests solely on the rights of nationality and the alleged wishes of the population.
The Italians point out, in the first place, that at the last Hungarian census (in 1910) the city contained about 24,000 Italians (not counting 6000 subjects of the kingdom of Italy), as against 16,000 Yugo-Slavs. To this the Yugo-Slavs retort that the Italian majority has been built up in the last few decades through the deliberate policy of the Magyar government; and that if the suburb of Sušak, which is practically part of the city, and the adjacent rural district were reckoned into the account, the Fiume territory would contain as many Yugo-Slavs as Italians.
Secondly, the Italians lay great weight upon the declarations of the National Council of Fiume and upon a plebiscite held in the city soon after the Armistice, as voicing the desire of the Fiumani to be united to Italy. The Yugo-Slavs deny that either of these things can be taken as a free and genuine expression of the wishes of the inhabitants.
At any rate, the Yugo-Slavs rest their argument mainly on other grounds. They maintain that Fiume is as naturally soldered on to their new state as Marseilles is to France; that this is the only satisfactory port on the Adriatic that that state can obtain; that its control by Italy would mean an intolerable subjection of Yugo-Slavia to her neighbor; and that it is inconceivable that their one good port should be taken away from them simply because within the walls of the city itself, not counting in the suburbs on which it vitally depends, Magyar machinations have built up an artificial plurality of barely 8000 Italians.
The Italians, of course, assert that farther south the Adriatic coast is full of good harbors, which could amply provide for the rather scanty trade of Yugo-Slavia. But it must be admitted that the mountain wall, which lines the coast from Fiume southward to the Drin, opposes very great obstacles to the opening up of a satisfactory outlet through the Dalmatian ports. At present there is, south of Fiume, only a single railway through to the coast—the wretched, winding rack-and-pinion road which comes down from Bosnia to Metković and Ragusa. It would be extremely difficult and expensive to develop and operate this line as a first-class railroad, and to link it up with the various parts of the Yugo-Slav state. Undoubtedly Fiume is the natural gate of Yugo-Slavia to the West; it is the only port that is well equipped today and that could easily adapt itself to the existing lines of communication. Even granted that another outlet could be developed farther south, it would require many years’ time and the expenditure of millions of dollars to bring this about.
It was, I think, because of the undeniable weight of such considerations, and in order that the new, poor, struggling state of the Yugo-Slavs should not be terribly handicapped at the outset by being denied that secure access to the sea for which Serbia had fought so long, that the American delegation at Paris took the stand it did on the Fiume question.
After going through many phases and fluctuations, this question appears to be at least appreciably nearer to a solution. The margin of difference between the two sides has now been reduced to a few points. If Italy gives way altogether on Dalmatia, it would seem only fair that the Yugo-Slavs should make some concessions as to Fiume, providing their economic interests can be reasonably insured. And it cannot be too strongly desired that if a compromise can be effected, the Yugo-Slavs recognizing their great debt to Italy, and the Italians recognizing the right to unity and independence of Yugo-Slavia, the two nations should go back to that attitude of mutual respect, coöperation, and fraternity which was the ideal of the noblest and most far-sighted Italian statesman of the nineteenth century, the great Mazzini.