The Serbo-Croatian movement in southern Hungary has been repressed by Hungary with the same bitterness and lack of success that have attended the attempts to stifle national aspirations elsewhere in Europe. No weapon has been left unused in fighting nationalism in Croatia. Official corruption, bribery, manipulation of judges, imprisonment without trial, military despotism, gerrymandering, electoral intimidation,—this has been for years and is still, the daily record in Croatia. If there were a Slavic Silvio Pellico, the world would know that the ministers of the aged Franz Josef are not very different from the ministers of the young Franz Josef, who crushed the Milanese and tracked Garibaldi like a beast. Radetzkys and Gorzkowskis are still wearing Austrian livery. To Austria and Hungary, Salonika and Macedonia may have been the dream. But Trieste, Fiume, and Dalmatia have always been the realities. If Hungary took her heel off the neck of the Croatians, Buda-Pesth might become another Belgrade and Hungary another Servia, land-locked with no other outlet than the Danube. This does not excuse, but it explains. In this world the battle is to the strong. The survival of the fittest is a historical as well as a biological fact.
In spite of their juxtaposition, the Serbo-Croats have never been able to unite. There have been more reasons for this than their political separation. They are divided in religion. The Servians are Orthodox, and the Croatians and Dalmatians Catholic. In Bosnia and Macedonia, the race adhered to both confessions, though in majority Orthodox, and has also a strong Mohammedan element. The Orthodox Servians of Servia use the Cyrillic alphabet, and the Catholic Croatians and Dalmatians of Austria-Hungary the Latin alphabet.
Until the recent Balkan Wars, the Croatians and Dalmatians considered themselves a much superior branch of the race to the Servians. They have certainly enjoyed a superior education and demonstrated a superior civilization. The probable reason for this is that they did not have the misfortune to be for centuries under the Ottoman yoke. The Croatians have never been willing to play the understudy to the Servians. Agram has considered itself the centre of the Serbo-Croat movement rather than Belgrade. It is a far more beautiful and modern city than Belgrade. Few cities of all Europe of its size can equal Agram for architecture, for municipal works, and for keen, stimulating intellectual life. Its university is the foyer of Serbo-Croat nationalism and of risorgimento literature. It was here that the one Roman bishop of the world, who dared to speak openly in the Vatican Council of 1870 against the doctrine of papal infallibility and remain within the Church, gave to his people the prophetic message that nationality transcended creeds. Here also another Catholic priest taught the oneness of Servians and Croatians in language and history, and proved by scholarly research which is universally admired, that Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia formed a triune kingdom, whose juridic union with the Austro-Hungarian Empire was wholly personal connection with the Hapsburg Crown, and had never been subjection to the Magyar. The Hungarians, during the past few years of bitterest persecution at Agram, have not been able to drive away the ghosts of Strossmayer and Racki. In Croatia, the pen has proved mightier than the sword.
Until recently, Austria-Hungary has not felt uneasy about the relationship between the Croatians and the Servians of the independent kingdom. But there has never been a minute since the annexation of 1908 that the statesmen of the Ballplatz have not been nervous about the Servian propaganda in Bosnia and Herzegovina. To keep Catholic Croatians and Orthodox Servians in antagonism with each other and with the Moslems, to prevent the education and economic emancipation of the Orthodox peasants, and to introduce German colonists and German industrial enterprises everywhere, has been the Austro-Hungarian program.
Vienna has used the Catholic Church and the propaganda of Catholic missions for dividing the Orthodox Servians in Bosnia from their Croatian brothers of the Catholic rite. Missionaries give every encouragement to Servians to desert the Orthodox Church. In the greater part of Bosnia, the Government has made it absolutely impossible for a child to receive an education elsewhere than in the Catholic schools. There are only two hundred and sixty-eight schools supported by the Government, of which one-tenth are placed in such a way that they serve exclusively other populations. The Bosnian budget provides four times as much money for the maintenance of the gendarmerie as for public schools.
Moslem law provides that all conquered land belongs to the Khalif. He farms it out in annual, life, or hereditary grants. In the Ottoman conquest of the Balkan Peninsula, the territories acquired were granted to successful soldiers on a basis which provided for a feudal army. The feudal proprietors, or beys, left the land to the peasants who occupied it, in consideration of an annual rental of a third of the yield of the land. The peasants had in addition to pay their tenth to the tax collectors of the Sultan. In territories that were on the borders of the Ottoman Empire, like Bosnia and Albania, the lands were largely retained by their former proprietors, who became Moslems. So the landed aristocracy remained indigenous.
The lot of the peasants in Bosnia, who were largely Orthodox Servians was not intolerable under Turkish rule, except when Moslem fanaticism was aroused by Christian separatist propaganda. Austria-Hungary claimed, however, that her occupation of the province was a measure dictated by humanity to ameliorate the lot of the enslaved Christians. But the Austrian administration has accomplished just the opposite. The new government from the beginning supported its authority upon the Moslem landowners, upon whose good-will they were dependent to prevent the awakening of national feeling among the peasants. Vienna was more complacent in overlooking abuses of the beys than had been Constantinople. For the Turks held their beys in check when exactions grew too bad. The Sublime Porte was afraid of giving an excuse for Christian intervention. But the Austrians encouraged the exactions of the beys in order to keep in abject subjection the Servian peasant population.
From the first moment of the Austro-Hungarian occupation, the peasants found that they would no longer enjoy undisturbed possession of their lands. The exodus of Mohammedan Bosnians, who, as we have seen elsewhere, were urged to follow the Ottoman flag, gave the Germans the opportunity of settling colonists on the vacated lands. This process of colonization was afterwards pursued to the detriment of the indigenous Christian population. Ernest Haeckel, the great philosopher, once said in a lecture at Jena that "the work of the German people to assure and develop civilization gives it the right to occupy the Balkans, Asia Minor, Syria, and Mesopotamia, and to exclude from these countries the races actually occupying them which are powerless and incapable." This statement, publicly made before a body of distinguished German thinkers, reveals the real ulterior ideal of the Drang nach Osten. Professor Wirth, dealing specifically with present possibilities, stated that the policy of Austria-Hungary in Bosnia must be to keep the peasantry in slavery and, as much as possible, to encourage them by oppression to emigrate. The reason given for this was: "To render powerful the Bosnian peasant is to render powerful the Servian people, which would be the suicide of Germany." Can we not see from this how public sentiment in Germany has stood behind the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Servia?
From 1890 to 1914, the theory of Haeckel and the advice of Wirth have been followed by the Austrian functionaries in Bosnia. No stone has been left unturned to drive the peasants from their lands. Right of inheritance has been suppressed, a tax collector has been introduced between the bey and his peasants, the taxes have been raised in many cases arbitrarily to the point where the peasants have been compelled to abandon their land. To German immigrants have been given communal lands which were necessary to the peasants for pasturage and the forests where their swine fed on acorns.
The population of Bosnia hardly surpasses thirty-five inhabitants to the kilometre. The total population is about two millions, of whom eight hundred thousand are Orthodox, six hundred thousand Moslem, and five hundred thousand Catholic. But practically all of this population—except one hundred thousand who are Jews, Protestants, and other German immigrants—is Servian or Servian-speaking. There are thirty-five thousand Germans, as opposed to one million eight hundred thousand Slavs. And yet German is the language of the administration, and the only language of the railways and posts and telegraphs, which in Bosnia have not ceased to be under the control of the military government. Many functionaries after thirty years of service in Bosnia do not know the language of the country. Two German newspapers are supported at the expense of the public budget to attack indigenous elements. In German schools, pupils are taught the history of Germany, but in Slavic schools the history of the south Slavs is excluded from the curriculum. There are fourteen schools for ten thousand Germans, and one school for every six thousand Slavs.