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: