The History of Yugoslavia. Henry Baerlein
impossible, and after a year of negotiations it was settled that the Serbian Church should be regarded as a sister Church.
The significance of Czecho-Slovakia's new Church is to be found in the national idea. So much is it a thing of the people and not of the priests that several schoolmasters have had to be ordained, the clergy being otherwise too scanty. In June 1919 a delegation from 3000 dissatisfied priests went to Rome. The Pope rejected what he called their foolish novelties. In January 1920 a secret meeting of 200 priests was held in Prague and 144 of them declared themselves for a new national Church. But few of them possessed the necessary resolution, such as was displayed by Dr. Farsky, a very intelligent and earnest young man who was Professor of Religion in the University and has now been appointed the Head of this new Church, as Bishop of Prague and Patriarch. His opponent, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Prague, has the reputation of being one of the cleverest of Czech politicians, and it will be interesting to see how the position develops. Since the War the Roman Catholic Church has lost 25 per cent. of its members—during the War it was, in the opinion of many, though perhaps it had no option, very much the servant of the Habsburgs. And one imagines that the Archbishop is handicapped by the demands of his party that the State should unquestionably continue to pay the yearly interests of the large number of monasteries that were dissolved more than a century ago by Joseph II. "All England's troubles," said the Coadjutor-Archbishop to me, "emanate from the fact that she nowadays pays nothing to the Church for those monasteries that were suppressed by Henry VIII." It is doubtful whether the Czechs, exulting in their regained liberty, will for the most part take the side of Rome when the matter has been fully ventilated and discussed. "We are not monarchist at all," said the Abbot Zavoral, "we are true to the Republic, we are democratic. And discussion is democratic, but," said he, "it should not be unlimited."
STROSSMAYER
To such a degree did the Austrian Government neglect its duties that, ten years ago, Croatia and Slavonia were short of at least one thousand school buildings and twelve hundred teachers. Bishop Strossmayer, coming from a family[43] which had settled at the sprawling town of Osiek, in Slavonia, did what he could. His Yugoslav Academy at Zagreb, the Zagreb University and the Society for studying the history of the Yugoslavs are but a few of the national institutions to which he devoted the princely revenues of Djakovo. From there this most remarkable man worked for the intellectual advancement of all the Southern Slavs; he subsidized the brothers Miladinoff who made the first collection of Bulgarian folk-songs (and who, on account of this forbidden subject, were both subsequently strangled at Constantinople); he paid for the education of young students no matter from what Yugoslav country they came; when Rački, the well-known Croat historian, was persecuted by the Government and living in misery, Strossmayer begged him to come to Djakovo, and Rački was his closest friend for many years; he built a large gallery at Zagreb and filled it with pictures, sacred and profane, and was as ready to assist a young artist in Istria as in Macedonia. It may be that he caused a circular to be read in the Croatian churches which referred to the Orthodox as "lost sheep," but he never used a method other than by prayer and the example of his life to cause them to forsake their fold; to him the forcible conversions by the Turks were as abhorrent as a system that was used in Bačka, where a whole village near Sombor was ennobled—but not those who afterwards came to live there—for having joined the Roman Church. He was himself no blind follower of the Vatican; and when he went with a very princely retinue—in part the weakness of his humble origin—to Rome in order to explain why he was unable to subscribe to the dogma of Papal Infallibility, he ravished his audience with a marvellous Latin oration, for he spoke many modern languages but was most thoroughly at home in Latin. Often in conversation he passed from one language to another, in search of what would best express his meaning, and frequently he would have recourse to Latin. He became reconciled to the dogma and it was due to the hostility of Magyar potentates that he remained for more than fifty years the Bishop of Djakovo, was not promoted to Zagreb nor made a cardinal. His fervent and statesmanlike views can be seen in his correspondence[44] with Gladstone. His head, like Gladstone's, caused one not to notice that the rest of the body was unimpressive; they had the same brilliance of eye. This man who worked continuously for the Southern Slavs could not be always a persona grata to Francis Joseph. Two remarks of the Emperor's are handed down, but that one may be a legend which, with the preface that Strossmayer was the only man to whom the Emperor was ever rude, says that Francis Joseph accounted for some proceedings of the bishop, as head of the National party in Croatia, by telling him that he must have been drunk—and, overtaken by remorse, making him an "Excellency" on the following day. Yet that story is certainly true which recounts how in 1881 the Emperor at Belovar said to him that he would sooner be an unimportant German Duke than Emperor of all the Slavs.
THE TURK IN MONTENEGRO AND MACEDONIA
The Emperor of a great many Southern Slavs, the Sultan, had in his time been satisfied if he could squeeze out of the Montenegrins so much tribute as would every year pay for his slippers. He could send an army now and then to devastate Cetinje and destroy the monastery where the people's bishop lived, but in those mountains a large army ran the risk of being ambushed and a very large one would be starved. Besides, now that the European scientists and travellers were beginning to go up to Montenegro and were, among the few sights of Cetinje, always shown the shrivelled head of Kara Mahmud Pasha, who in 1796 had been defeated, it was not advisable, the Sultan thought, that any other Turkish head of prominence should have this fate. … In Macedonia it was very different; the population might have once been warlike, but had so successfully been governed that some German travellers of the sixteenth century, Hans Ternschwamm and Ritter Gerlach, had described them as a "conquered, down-trodden, imprisoned people" who did not dare to lift up their heads, a people who "without intermission must toil for the Turks." And if three hundred years of this life had not completely tamed them, the Sultan had every confidence that the Greek Patriarch would tell the Powers what they knew already, namely, that the Macedonian Christians only had to pay a tenth and sometimes only an eleventh part of certain crops and that in return they were protected by the Spahi from the ills which every humbler man is heir to, and that the Powers, who politically said they must respect the Sultan, must now morally respect him also. But in 1850 the Turkish Government made a change; in place of the old Spahi there was installed a landlord who retained the name of Spahi but who had none of his predecessor's careless benevolence. The property had been hired out to him for life and his one object was to get from it as much as possible. He made demands not only for a tenth but for a fifth and even a third part, and not only of the maize and wheat but of every product of the soil. Cattle, bees, vegetables, fruit—of all of these he had to have his share; the peasant often cut his fruit trees down as he could not afford to pay the various taxes that were put on them. In the old days the Spahi had an arrangement with a whole village, and a system so impersonal was much less onerous than when demands were made from every household individually. The new sort of Spahi was not only an evil product of the time, but as the progress of industry in other countries was supplying the Turkish market with many new commodities, so in order to acquire these articles for himself he exacted more and more tribute from the helpless peasants. Progress in Macedonia was not merely retarded—lands which had been under cultivation were abandoned, and the peasant, having been despoiled of everything, perhaps having borrowed money at 9 or 10 per cent., was no longer able to get his living from the land on which so many generations of his ancestors had laboured. It was no longer possible for him to get the mess of maize and miserable bread, the strips of repulsive-looking flesh that were his luxury, the medicine for his underfed children who were moaning on the naked earth of his cabin, and at the same time to make the necessary contributions to the landlord or the landlord's agent, whom the villagers had to furnish with a riding horse, with gun and ammunition, with furs and with clothing appropriate to his position, with special gifts whenever he or they were marrying, and with all the pretty girls on whom his eye had rested. Therefore the čifčija would lose the last shadow of freedom, he would become a serf. His sowing and his reaping would now be for another, and as it did not profit him at all to make the land more fruitful, he was content with any prehistoric implement, with little wooden ploughs and with a total absence of manure.