One may object that even if the people were divided by rough-and-ready methods, that was no reason why they should oppose each other, and indeed a number of frontier incidents which occurred between the time of the Congress and 1885 were not regarded, either by Serbs or by Bulgars, as being serious obstacles to a union. But Russia and Austria, revelling in the intrigues, continued to pull the two States now this way and now that, and all too frequently against each other. It can thus not be a matter of surprise if the rather inexperienced statesmen of those little countries fell into line with the two Great Powers and spent a good deal of their energies in assailing each other. So blind, alas! were these statesmen that all the tears of St. Petka would not have cured them, and now the two kindred people, so progressive in many ways, are--to speak of each people as a whole--further apart than when their shaggy forefathers came over the Carpathians. It has been the fate of the Yugoslavs--Slovenes, Croats, Serbs and Bulgars--to live for centuries beside each other and be kept always, by foreign masters, isolated from each other. At rare intervals, as we shall see in following their history, a person has arisen who has tried, with altruistic or with selfish motives, to make some sort of union of the Yugoslavs. And now we will go back to the time when Slavs first wandered westward to the Balkans. I GLORY AND DISASTER ARRIVAL OF THE SOUTHERN SLAVS--THEIR UNFORTUNATE DEMOCRATIC WAYS--TWO EARLY STATES--ECCLESIASTICAL ROCKS--THE SLAVS AND THEIR NEIGHBOURS--SIMEON THE BULGAR--WHAT ARE THE BULGARS?--STEPHEN NEMANIA--THE SLOVENES ARE SUBMERGED--THE FATE OF THE CROATS--THE GLORY OF DUBROVNIK--A GALLANT REPUBLIC--THE GLORIOUS DUŠAN--EVIL DAYS AND THE PEOPLE'S HERO--THE "GOOD CHRISTIANS" OF BOSNIA--KOSSOVO--GATHERING DARKNESS. ARRIVAL OF THE SOUTHERN SLAVS