THE official name of this country is the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and the Slovenes. Of these three ethnical groups(tribes sounds too much like African natives and might offend them)the Serbs, who are the most important, live in the east along the banks of the Save which joins the Danube at a point where the capital Belgrade has been built.The Croats live in the center between the Drave, also a tributary of the Danube, and the Adriatic, while the Slovenes occupy the little triangle between the Drave, the Istrian peninsula and Croatia.Modern Serbia however is composed of several other racial groups.It has absorbed Montenegro, the picturesque mountain state, famous for its four hundred years of war against the Turks, and affectionately remembered ever since the days we danced to the tune of“The Merry Widow”waltz.And it also has annexed a well-known remnant of the old Austrian Empire, the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, old Serbian territory, but taken away from Turkey by the Austrians, and the source of that ill-feeling between the Serbians and the Austrians which finally ended in the murder of Serajevo in 1914,the immediate(although by no means the real)cause of the Great War.

Serbia(the old habit is too strong—hereafter when I write Serbia I really mean the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes)is essentially a Balkan state and its history is essentially that of a country subjected to five hundred years of Moslem slavery. Since the war it has a sea-front on the Adriatic, bu it remains cut off from its own sea-front by the Dinaric Alps.Even if it could build railroads across the Dinaric Alps(and railroads cost a lot of money)there would be no convenient harbors except perhaps Ragusa(or Dubrovnik, as it is now called),one of the great medieval distributing centers for colonial merchandise.It was the only Mediterranean city which refused to accept defeat after the discovery of the direct ocean routes to America and India and it continued to send its far-famed Argosies(ships from Aragusia)to Calicut and Cuba until a foolish participation in the ill-fated expedition of the Armada deprived it of its last remaining Squadrons.

Unfortunately Dubrovnik offers no facilities to modern steamers. As for Fiume and Trieste, the natural outlets for Serbia, the Old Men of Versailles gave one of these cities to Italy and the other one she took for herself, although she really had no need for them as they would only compete with Venice, which aspired to regain its ancient and honorable position as mistress of the Adriatic.As a result, the grass now grows in the dock yards of Trieste and Fiume while Serbia, as of old, must send its agricultural products by one of three routes.It may send them down the Danube to the Black Sea, which is about as practical as if New York should export its merchandise to London by way of Lake Erie and the St.Lawrence River.It may send them up the Danube to Vienna and from there through one of the mountain passes to Bremen, Hamburg or Rotterdam, which is also an exceedingly expensive procedure.Or it may send them by rail to Fiume, where the Italians of course do their best to ruin their Slavic competitors.

In this respect, therefore, nothing has been changed since the days before the war when Serbia was kept a land-locked state at the instigation of the Austrian Empire. It is a bit sad to reflect that pigs were primarily responsible for the outbreak of that terrible disaster.For Serbia had only one great article of export—pigs—and by putting impossible duties on pigs, the Austrians and the Hungarians were able to ruin the only trade from which Serbia derived any profit at all.The dead Austrian Grand Duke was the pretext for the mobilization of all the armed forces of Europe.But the underlying cause of all the ill-feeling in the north-eastern corner of the Balkans was the duty on pigs.

And speaking of pigs, pigs prosper on acorns. That is why they were so plentiful in the triangle between the Adriatic and the Danube and the mountains of Macedonia, for it is densely covered with oak forests.There would be more forests today if the Romans and the Venetians had not denuded these hills in a most irresponsible fashion to get wood for their vessels.

What other resources does the country have to feed and clothe its 12,000,000 inhabitants, outside of pigs?There is some coal and iron but there seems to be already by far too much coal and iron in this world, and it would be very costly to carry it all the way by rail to one of the German ports, and as I have said before, Serbia has no decent harbor of its own.

After the war Serbia got part of the great Hungarian Plain, the so-called Voyvodika, which is good agricultural land. The valleys of the Drave and Save will provide it with enough grain and corn for its own people.The Morava valley connecting with that of the Vardar River is a good enough trade-route which connects northern Europe with Saloniki on the Aegean Sea.It is really a branch of the great trunk lines connecting Nish(the birthplace of Constantine the Great and the spot where Frederick Barbarossa, on his ill-fated expedition to the Holy Land, was entertained for a while by the famous Serbian Prince Stephen)with Constantinople and Asia Minor.

But, generally speaking, Serbia cannot look forward to a great future as an industrial state. Like Bulgaria it will have to remain a nation of fairly prosperous Slavic farmers.Who has ever been able to compare a six-foot peasant from Skoplje(or Uskub)or Mitrovitsa to a cockney workman from Manchester or Sheffield will have some doubts whether such a fate is entirely without its compensations.Belgrade may forever remain an amiable little country town like Oslo or Bern, but does it really want to compete in size with Birmingham or Chicago?Perhaps it does.The modern soul is a strange thing and the Serbian peasant would not be the first to have his sound ancestral standard of values upset by the counterfeit cultural ideals of our Hollywood prophets.