In that same year, 1906, Montenegro's first Skupština assembled. Many people wondered why the autocrat bestowed a Constitution and a Skupština upon his subjects. They for their part--at least the great majority whose knowledge of the world was gained by looking at it from their mountain fastnesses--could never for a moment doubt but that the Montenegrins were the grandest and the noblest of the Serbs. Hour after hour of peace they spent, disdaining to do any work more arduous than smoking cigarettes and drinking rakia, and talking, talking ... they would relate to one another what their ancestors had done by way of cutting Turkish noses, and unweariedly they would announce how their own blood was undiluted and heroic. If Greater Serbia was to be created it was surely they who--but Nikita, their keen-witted ruler, was not so certain. The Karageorgevič were no longer being treated by Europe as outlaws; by his constitutional methods King Peter had not only effected vast and needed improvements in his country, but was gradually winning for himself and it, if not a general esteem, at all events the first approach to that condition which for so long had been lacking. And Nikita was uneasy. He must also have a Constitution in his country and a Skupština. Very well he knew that with the inexperience of his people, with their furious local rivalries and with his power of veto, he would not be greatly hampered by this Skupština. It would be a semblance of modernity. Nikita had no intention of allowing himself to be put in the shade by the Prime Minister. Whether it was Tomanović, a kindly man of straw, or General Martinović, an upright soldier, or anybody else--their function was to execute the royal orders. The differences which separate one political party from another in a Balkan State, and separate them very often into frantically hostile camps, are wont to be minute as to their principles, for it is largely a question as to whether you are a devotee of this or of that statesman. Two of the three parties which existed in Montenegro down to the Great War were both grouped round the Crown Prince Danilo, and apparently the sole difference between them was that no member of the Miuškević Cabinet had been in prison. To a western European it would be surprising that the kindred Radović party should also be on terms of close friendship with Danilo, seeing that it consisted of Nikita's dissatisfied relatives (one of these was Radović's powerful father-in-law) who disliked the new statute which limited the Royal Family to Nikita and his children. Danilo protected this party for personal reasons. As for the third political party, that of General Martinović, its principal plank was its opposition to the other two parties. Mita Martinović himself was not much of a politician; he was a sturdy friend of Russia. Of his rivals, Lazar Miuškević, a bearded, rather stout, medium-sized man, has a pious opinion of his