No country deplores more the weakness of the League of Nations and is more alarmed over what we might term international anarchy than Czechoslovakia. With her composite population and her peculiar geographic position, with impossible frontiers from the strategic point of view, she is eager for some permanent assurance of international political stability. There are only about six million Czechs. Even with the Slovaks, they number scarcely eight millions. Czechoslovakia could not exist if the Germans of Bohemia went to Germany and the Hungarians of Slovakia to Hungary. It is natural, then, that security of frontiers, based upon international agreement rather than upon force or precarious alliances, is the goal of the Czechoslovak diplomacy. This explains the move of Dr. Benes at the Genoa Conference in the summer of 1922, when he tried to get the powers to accept the most elementary of all principles, that of a universal and binding compact of non-aggression. The Czechoslovaks, not being able to defend their state, and fearing to have the defense of the treaties to which they owe their existence depend upon armies and alliances, have proposed universal and reciprocal declaration of the sanctity of frontiers, and want the League of Nations to become an automatic proscriber of any nation disturbing the _status quo_ of the Paris peace settlement. When we estimate the chances of long life for so curiously formed a state as Czechoslovakia, we have no other grounds for assuming its durability than the adoption of a program like that advocated by Dr. Benes at Genoa. If the Germans all get together none can prevent them from snuffing the life out of Czechoslovakia, especially if they are able to form once more an alliance with Hungary. Italy alone could put obstacles in the path of such a program, provided there is no world organization to maintain the frontiers of the Paris treaties. CHAPTER XIV THE EVOLUTION OF SERBIA INTO JUGOSLAVIA