History has conformed to this aspect of geography. Not only did Rome long hold the whole eastern coast and plant there Latin colonies and a Latin tongue which, in some spots at least, seem never to have disappeared; but Venice succeeded to the inheritance of Rome, and from the tenth century to the end of the eighteenth imposed her sway over a large part of the eastern littoral and the islands. The Slavs had, indeed, penetrated to the coast or near it, in the seventh century; and ever since it may be assumed that the bulk of the population in almost every province on this coast has been of Slavic stock. Nevertheless, the Italians remained the dominant race in every respect save numbers; theirs was the language of business, of politics, of society, of literature, the language which almost everyone understood and tried to speak, if he pretended to be anybody; Italian was the civilization which has left such splendid monuments in the _duomi_ and _palazzi_, the _loggie_ and the _campanili_, which adorn the coast cities from Trieste to Ragusa. It is no great exaggeration when Italians today talk of eighteen centuries of _Italianità_ in the lands east of the Adriatic. Nor is it strange that in Dalmatia, with her vines and olives, laurels and cypresses, and here and there a palm; with her warm Mediterranean sun and ever-present vistas of blue waters; with her cities studded with Roman and Venetian remains, and the lion of San Marco guarding every older edifice; the present-day Italian should feel himself very much in his own country. But the nineteenth century revivals of dormant nationalities have brought cruel trials to the defenders of historic civilizations. Since the middle of that century, the Adriatic lands have seen a bitter conflict between the resurgent Croats and Slovenes, who are in most cases the majority, and the Italians. This conflict has been complicated and envenomed by the insidious and sometimes violent interventions of the Austrian and Hungarian authorities, both anxious to maintain their hold upon the coast by playing off the two chief nationalities of that region against one another. At Fiume the Magyars systematically favored the Italians in order to prevent the control of Hungary’s one port by the Croatians. In the other coastal territories the Austrians generally supported and spurred on the Slavs, who were regarded as less dangerous than the obnoxious nation which had brought Austria to grief in 1859 and 1866. Hence at the present day both of the rival races can say that the natural course of development has been perverted: neither quite likes to accept the ethnographic status quo produced through fifty years of machinations or violence by Vienna and Budapest.