It will be objected that this is only a present impression, and that it tells us nothing of those days when, apparently, the whole _raison d’être_ of the population was to furnish fighting-men for the army of Maria Theresa. In answer to this, two points must be made clear: first, the state of Croatia proper during the past two centuries; second, the position occupied at the same period by other members of the Croatian race.[5] The argument “e nihilo nihil” need hardly be stated here, though it will be seen later that nothing has been added to the Croats except opportunity. [5] For the sake of clearness, it may be well to say that Croatia proper means that district across the Save of which Agram (_i.e._ Zagreb) is the capital; and that the same race occupies the entire territory from the Drave to the Lake of Scutari; and from the Roumanian frontier to the Adriatic. There is some Italian population in the extreme west, _e.g._, at Zara; but most of this region is exclusively Slavonic, and the Servo-Croatian language prevails with certain modifications over the whole of it. There is also a considerable Croat population in Istria, Carniola, Lower Austria, and the adjoining parts of Hungary. Throughout the eighteenth century the policy of the Austrian Government was to repress as far as possible the Slavonic peoples that lay under its rule. Bohemia, which had lost its independence at the Thirty Years’ War, was intellectually the “desert” which the Emperor Ferdinand had wished to make it; and the same drastic measures, though for somewhat different reasons, were applied to the subject races that fringed the southern border. Croatia in particular was used merely as an outpost against Turkish invasion: “purchased,” as Dr. Kuhač says, “with a few empty political concessions,” but kept in reality under the close discipline of a barrack-state. “We were not allowed,” he continues, “to provide for our people the advantages of a real city, we had no centre of intellectual life and progress, and it was considered a sufficient privilege if the name of capital was bestowed upon one or other of our towns.”[6] [6] Josip Haydn, p. 3.