Part 16

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.

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.