Jugoslavia Has a Problem

jUGOSLAVIA is the country, if ever there was one, where East meets West. For centuries Serbia, the kernel of the present state, lay under the Turkish yoke, but in spite of the sporadic persecutions of the Sublime Porte they managed to preserve their national characteristics more or less intact. They remained a Slav race, and professed their own brand of the Orthodox religion.
In the middle of the nineteenth century the Serbs won their independence. It was a small principality with its capital at Belgrade, right on the Hungarian frontier-separated from it only by the Danube.
In 1914 a Serb killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne. The Austrian arguments pointing to the complicity of the Serbian dynasty in the assassination have never been satisfactorily disproved, especially in view of the record of the Karageorgovitch family.
In 1918 Serbia doubled itself and became the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The Serbs were the largest element, partly orientalised, highly superstitious like many of the Orthodox, of very primitive culture, and preferring the verdict of the dagger to the lengthier processes of the law., aeeeretreere
PRAYER. ABOVE, IN CROATIAN, THE VILLAGER READS "SAVE YOUR SOUL" AND PAUSES FOR PRAYER ON HIS WAY TO WORK.
The Slovenes, who up till 1918 had been one of the many partners in the Dual Monarchy, are intensely Catholic, highly cultured and completely occidental, The same can be said of the Croats, who were formerly a part of Hungary.
The new kingdom of Jugoslavia acquired Montenegro, who were rewarded for fighting SUNDAY IN on the winning side during the Great War by being deprived of their independence, JUGOSLAVIA. Macedonia, which belonged to Bulgaria and is entirely devoted to secret societies, Bosnia and Herzegovina, also torn from Austria Hungary, and many Albanians in the south and Hungarians in the north.
Italy now wants the Albanians, Hungary wants Croatia, Hitler, posing as the successor fo the Habsburgs, wants Slovenia, and Bulgaria would like to have Macedonia.
Unfortunately for the Serbs they have not kept their promises any more than the Czechs did. And when a Serbian deputy shot two Croat members during a sifting of the Parliament in 1928, King Alexander suspended the Constitution, changed the name of the country to Jugoslavia (South Slays) and forbade all discussion of local autonomy.
With the example of Czechoslovakia before their eyes the Serbs are now making rather belated and half-hearted attempts to honour the pledges given twenty years ago.