Ethnographically, Venetia Julia seems to show a slight Yugo-Slav majority (52%). In Gorizia there were in 1910 155,000 Slovenes against 90,000 Italians; in Trieste 119,000 Italians against 59,000 Yugo-Slavs; in Istria 203,000 Yugo-Slavs against 147,000 Italians. But the Italians, not without some show of reason, contest these figures as being much too favorable to their opponents, owing to the bias and the unscrupulous methods of the Austrian census-takers. Furthermore, it would be difficult for even an honest census to give an accurate picture of the racial complexities of a province like Istria, which has been said to contain more fragments of diverse nationalities than any other province of similar size in Austria, and fragments that generally do not get properly classified in the census because there is no rubric for them. What is one to do with such ethnographic curios as the Chiches, the Morlaks, the Rumenes of Istria--people who do not know what they are themselves, nor can any philologist tell them? One of the best observers of the region has discovered no less than thirteen “ethnographic nuances,” and such a confusion and intermixture of tongues that even educated people had difficulty in deciding what language they spoke. He found here Croaticized Slovenes, and Slovenized Croats; Croaticized Rumenes, Italianized Croats, and Croaticized Italians; finally a population of whom all that could be said was that their costume was Italian, their manners Slav, and their language a mixture of everything. Under such circumstances one cannot place great reliance on the census. Perhaps it is more significant that just before the War, out of seventeen deputies elected from these three provinces to the Reichsrat, ten were Italians, and only seven Yugo-Slavs. In the provincial diets the Italians outnumbered the Slavs two to one. Seventy per cent of the communes are said to have had Italian administrations. Italian was indubitably the chief language of business, of administration, of the cities, and of the educated classes pretty generally, the one language that everybody knew and without which it was impossible to get along. Under these circumstances, it has, in the first place, been settled that Trieste belongs to Italy. Of the Italian character and sentiment of that city throughout its history, there can be no doubt. If the Yugo-Slavs for a time laid claim to it, that was because the rural districts around it are Slovene and because Trieste is the natural port for the Slovene provinces in the interior. Nevertheless, it would appear that the Yugo-Slavs would have been wiser never to raise a claim so obviously doomed to defeat.