But there is a still wider divergence between the problems of Greater Rumania and Greater Serbia than is shown by the figures. The redeemed Rumanians could be assimilated with those of the kingdom into one nation. They had a common interest in standing together against alien elements formidable in number. In Greater Serbia the Serbian-speaking elements had been separated for centuries. With radically different social and political, religious and cultural backgrounds, amalgamation was a complicated problem. Many Serbians have attempted to draw a parallel between the unification of the Italians and that of the Jugoslavs. The analogy does not hold, because the Italians were all of the same religion, they were a product of the same Occidental culture, and their social and political experience had not, in modern times, at least, been dissimilar. The Jugoslavs, on the other hand, had been separated since the Middle Ages by formidable barriers. Serbs and Montenegrins are Orthodox; Bosnians, Herzegovinians, and a portion of the inhabitants of what is known as New Serbia are Orthodox, Catholic, and Mohammedan; while most of the Croats, Dalmatians, and Slovenes are Catholic. The Jugoslavs of the Hapsburg Empire are Occidentals, and have always been under the influence of Rome. Most of them escaped wholly the Ottoman yoke. They have evolved a high degree of civilization, as we Westerners understand that term, and have little except language in common with the Serbians, a people that lived for hundreds of years under the shadow of the Crescent. It was impossible to expect that the more cultivated Serbian-speaking peoples of the Hapsburg Empire should be willing to play second fiddle to a Balkan people whose manner of life and habits of mind were semi-Oriental.