And Jonescu unfortunately had to shake his head.
In the fatuous policy of crying for the whole Banat—they even require the little island in the Danube between Semlin and Belgrade—Bratiano is assisted by the aged Marghiloman, who is the chief of a branch of the Conservative party. But the relations between these two do not seem destined to be cordial, since Bratiano is married to Marghiloman's divorced wife.
May the Roumanian people become reconciled to Yugoslavia's righteous possession of part of the Banat. It would be a pity if these two neighbours were to live together on such terms as, in the eastern county of the Banat, Caras-Severin, do the Bufani and the other Roumanians. The Bufani came from Roumania some hundred and fifty or two hundred years ago, on account of the taxes which they found intolerable; and they have not been able to arrive at amicable relations with those countrymen of theirs who are the descendants of earlier emigrants. Very seldom do the Bufani and the others intermarry. These Bufani, so say the others, are like ivy. "They called out," complain the others, "they called out: 'Little brother, be good to us!' and then they strangled us." The Bufani, who are easily recognizable by their dialect, frequent the same church and have one priest with the others, but they have a separate cemetery.
(e) The Hungarian Frontier
North of the town of Subotica the frontier between Yugoslavia and Hungary is almost a natural one, as it runs over vast hills of shifting sand which are still partly in motion. Neither on foot nor on horseback, still less with loaded carts, is it possible to travel through these hills. But to the east and to the west of them the frontier is no better than that which separates Yugoslavia from Roumania, and when it came to the delimitation the Magyars thought it would be preferable if this work were done with their assistance. Otherwise, so they urged, there would be no check upon the wicked intolerance of their neighbours. It is true that they themselves had in the past been in favour of centralization, but against this one must remember that the "subject nationalities" were inferior beings. The Yugoslavs, the Roumanians and the Slovaks could not claim a glorious descent from Attila, of whom a fresco decorates the House of Parliament at Buda-Pest, and thus the Magyars had always thought it seemly that, by various devices, a limit should be put to the number of Yugoslav, Roumanian and Slovak deputies. Count Apponyi and his colleagues told the Peace Conference very frankly at the beginning of 1920 that it really ought to take their word for it, and not persist in looking on the Yugoslavs, etc., as if they were as good as any Magyar. Surely it was obvious that Yugoslavia, Greater Roumania and Czecho-Slovakia would be "artificial and improvised creations, devoid of the traditions of political solidarity and incapable of producing any." But if the Supreme Council was resolved to allow certain Magyar territories to join themselves, if they desired, to these ephemeral States it would be necessary to ascertain by means of a plebiscite what were the real wishes of the people in these territories; and Count Apponyi was kind enough to tell the Council very definitely how this plebiscite should be conducted. The principal Allies were to arrange, in accordance with the Magyar Government, as to the districts in which a plebiscite was to be held, and the secret voting was to be controlled by neutral commissions and delegates of the interested Governments. This may sound rather rash on the part of the Magyars, since a plebiscite, no matter how it was arranged and controlled, would presumably detach a good many jewels from the crown of St. Stephen, and it was not astonishing that Count Apponyi and his friends proposed that the Magyars should be safeguarded by further Commissions which, if requisite, would override the results of the voting. These results would indeed, as between the Magyars and the Yugoslavs, have given our Allies a larger dominion than they have actually obtained. The triangle south of Szeged, to which we have alluded, would certainly, if there had been a plebiscite, have gone to Yugoslavia. In Baranja the Yugoslavs have claimed that the census of 1910, which indicated 36,000 Serbo-Croats, should have given them 70,000; but this does not take account of the large number of Šokci—Slavs whose ancestors were forcibly converted to Catholicism and who came to consider themselves as one with the Catholic Magyars. This widespread phenomenon of race being superseded by religion may be noticed, for example, at Janjevo in the district of Old Serbia; it is inhabited by the descendants of Dubrovnik colonists who, being Catholic, have come to look upon themselves as Albanians. In Hungary the dominant Magyar minority was wont to clasp the subject races to its bosom, not with bonds of love but of religion. Thus in 1914 at Marmoros-Sziget they charged 100 persons with high treason, because it was their wish to leave the Uniate Church, in communion with Rome, and return to the Orthodox faith. The same charge would have been preferred against certain Ruthenians who were just as unwilling to be members of the Uniate Church; but in the case of these humble, backward people the conversion had been effected by their priests, who would thereby procure for themselves a better situation, and the Ruthenians, who had not been told of this occurrence, were under the impression that they were still Orthodox. Professor Cvijić believes that, with the help of the Catholic religion, no less than 113,000 Serbo-Croats have in Baranja been lost by their Yugoslav brethren.... When the Yugoslavs were asked by the Supreme Council to evacuate most of Baranja they did so. A republic, under the presidency of one Dobrović, a well-known cubist painter, a native of those parts, was formed by Yugoslavs and the Magyars whose freedom had been safeguarded under their rule. But as this republic was not assisted by the Yugoslav Government it only lasted for a week.
Farther to the west is the Prekomurdje, that interesting Slovene district which extends for about 25 miles along the Mur. The rich plain that adjoins the river is mostly in the possession of large landowners, while the hilly country to the north sustains a scattered and poor population of Calvinists. There are in the whole Prekomurdje some 120,000 Yugoslavs, who are descendants of the old Pannonian Slovenes. This healthy, honest people has indeed eighteen Catholic and eight Protestant priests, but is otherwise almost destitute of an intelligentsia. They speak nothing but Slovene, and yet the Magyars had for ten years previous to the War been so imperialist that only Magyar schools were tolerated. Thus it happened that the children, like so many others in the Magyar schools, were at a loss to understand what they were writing, and if their teacher chanced to learn the Slovene language he was there and then transferred to Transylvania or the Slovak country or some other province where he had to teach his pupils in the Magyar which they did not know. He was supposed to make the children feel the vast superiority of all things Magyar, so that they should be ashamed to walk with their own fathers in the streets and speak another tongue. We are told occasionally in the Morning Post that consideration should be shown to the Magyars since they are a proud people, but would they not merit more consideration if they were a grateful people, grateful that the rest of Europe, overlooking their Mongolian origin, has accepted them as equals? The Magyars were so thoroughly persuaded of their own pre-eminence that when the devotees of Haydn founded in his honour a society at Eisenstadt, where he had worked, it was allowed on the condition that the statutes and the name of the society and so forth should be in the Magyar language, although Haydn was a German. Evidently the poor Slovenes of the Prekomurdje would be swamped unless they showed exceptional vigour. And when they managed to survive until after the War the Americans in Paris were for handing them to Hungary on the ground that the frontier would, if it included them in Yugoslavia, be an awkward one. Such is also the opinion of Mr. A. H. E. Taylor in his The Future of the Southern Slavs; this author advocates that Yugoslavia should be bounded by the Mur, albeit in another part of the same book he says that "a small river is not usually a good frontier, except on the map"; and the Mur is so narrow that when Dr. Gaston Reverdy, of the French army, and I arrived at Ljutomir we found that a crowd of these men and boys had waded across the stream in order to lay their cause before the doctor, who represented the Entente in that region. The Bolševik Magyars were just then threatening to set all Prekomurdje on fire, and the pleasant-looking, rather shy men who stood in rows before us begged the doctor to procure them weapons—they would be able to defend themselves. It is satisfactory to know that most of this portion of the Yugoslav lands has, after all, not been lost to the mother country.
(f) The Austrian Frontier
A considerable part of the frontier between Yugoslavia and Austria has been determined by a plebiscite which was held, under French, British and Italian control, in the autumn of 1920. The Slovenes during the previous year had pointed out that while they could no longer claim so wide a territory now that Austria had been drawn towards the Adriatic, yet the rural population of Carinthia had remained Slovene, thanks to the notable qualities of that people. The German-Austrians, on the other hand, maintained that country districts are the appanages of a town, so that the wishes of a rural population are of secondary importance. While these questions were being debated in 1919 by the two interested parties—and debated, very often, by their rifles—the Italians intervened. Sonnino's paper, the Epoca, made a great outcry over Klagenfurt (Celovec) which, if given to the Yugoslavs, would be an insurmountable barrier, it said, to the trade between Triest and Vienna, although it was clear that the railway connection through Tarvis remained in the hands of the Italians. (There is not a single Italian civilian in Tarvis—but no matter.) Meanwhile the French Press noted that the Italians—presumably not as traders but as benefactors—were seeing to it that the Austrians did not run short of arms and munitions. For many months a large area was in a condition of uncertainty and turmoil, till at last the Peace Conference ordered a plebiscite.
Two zones in Carinthia—"A" to the south-east, with its centre at Velikovec (Völkermarkt), and "B" to the north-west, with its centre at Klagenfurt (Celovec)—were mapped out, and it was agreed that if the voting in "A," the larger zone, were favourable to Austria, then the other zone would automatically fall to that country. For several months before the voting day this area—a region of beautiful and prosperous valleys watered by the broad Drave and surrounded by magnificent mountain ranges—for several months this area was the scene of great activity. German-Austrians and Yugoslavs no longer, as in 1919, attacked each other with the implements of war, but with pamphlet, broadsheet, with eloquence and bribery. Austrian and Yugoslav officials took up their headquarters at various places and saw to it that every voter should be posted as to the moral and material advantage he would reap by helping to make the land Austrian or Yugoslav, as the case might be. All those were entitled to vote who, being twenty years of age in January 1919, had their habitual residence in this area; or, if not born in the district, had belonged to it or had their habitual residence there from, at least, January 1, 1912. The larger zone "A" was left under Yugoslav administration, while zone "B" was under the Austrian authorities; and the Inter-Allied officials exercised a very close supervision in order, for example, to protect the partisans of either side from undue repression at the hands of their opponents. Neither the Austrians nor the Yugoslavs lost any opportunities for saying in public that the Inter-Allied Commissions were honestly making every effort to be impartial. It was, however, unfortunate that Italy should have sent as her chief representative Prince Livio Borghese, who may have been as impartial as his colleagues, but whose reputation, whether merited or otherwise, could scarcely commend itself to the Yugoslavs. They believed that his activities in Buda-Pest, under the Bolševik régime, and afterwards in Vienna, had been very hostile to themselves. Each of the three allied commissioners had a staff of some fifty or sixty officials, whose upkeep and expenses were paid by the two interested countries.
If an average person had been asked to foretell the result of the plebiscite I suppose he would have said that in zone "A" the Yugoslavs and in zone "B" the Austrians would be successful. We have seen how the Slovene renaissance of the nineteenth century was met by the central authorities in Vienna (particularly after the German victory of 1871), and how the local functionaries assisted them. They argued that Austria with her miscellaneous races could only survive if one of them was supreme. Therefore they looked askance on every one who regarded himself as a Slovene; if he rose to be an official it had to be in another part of the Monarchy, while for the maintenance of Austria (oblivious to the argument that Austria was a perfectly unnatural affair) they favoured all those who announced themselves to be on the side of the predominant race. From 1903 onwards the Slovene language was barred from the courts of Carinthia, and if a person did not understand the language of the German magistrates he had to use an interpreter. The land was invaded by the German intelligentsia: professors, masters in primary and secondary schools, doctors, lawyers and so forth, excise officials and railway officials—in 1912 Carinthia possessed about 5000 of these and only 1½ per cent. were Slovenes. Those among the Slovenes who were capable of serving in such positions were dispatched to Carniola, Dalmatia or preferably to the German-speaking lands of the Empire. A provincial agricultural authority was set up in 1910 which was recognized by the State and which enjoyed a monopoly. Its object was to aid the progress of agriculture by establishing and supporting agricultural schools, sending experts to the farmer, distributing subsidies for the purchase of machinery, artificial manure and so on. The council consisted of twenty-one members, of whom only one was a Slovene; the subsidies were given to those who were recognized as Germanophils, while requests were not permitted in the Slovene tongue. As for the electoral districts, they were so manipulated that one deputy represented 120,000 Slovenes and another represented 27,000 Germans. Constituencies in which there was a German majority were allowed to send two members, while the others only sent one. The German railway employees worked so thoroughly for pan-Germanism that various Slovenes were arrested—among them the mayor of a large village who wanted to travel from Celovec—for asking in the Slovene language for a ticket. With regard to schools, there were throughout Carinthia in 1860 some 28 Slovene and 56 Slovene-German foundations, whereas in 1914 there were 2 Slovene, 30 German and 84 mixed schools, where the two languages were supposed to co-exist; they were indeed the home of two languages, for the children were nearly all Slovene, whereas the teacher and the language he used were German. Among 230 masters only 20 could read and write Slovene. Qualified teachers who could satisfy this test were, as we have mentioned, sent to other parts of the Empire. So far did the system go that Slovene peasants upon whom the Government had forced a German education speedily forgot the two hundred words which they had learned, but as they had been taught no other script than the German they were accustomed to write the Slovene language with German Gothic characters. These peasants were fairly impervious to Germanization; their strong sense of national consciousness was supported by the books, religious and otherwise, which they received every year from some such society as that of St. Hermagoras at Celovec, which distributed half a million books a year among its 90,000 members.