own abilities, and is, or was, very proud of his friendship with Danilo. He need not be taken seriously, for he has no knowledge of administration, no political courage and no popular support. [During the Great War he was for a time the Premier, and after the War, when the other five ex-Premiers ranged themselves against Nikita, he stayed in Switzerland, where he tried for many months to make up his mind.] Andrija Radović, a middle-aged man, whose tall, athletic form is crowned with the head of a grave poet, was erstwhile a favourite of Nikita's. Being related to the Royal Family, Nikita called him his fourth son, and when, after the fatuous bomb conspiracy (of which more anon), Radović was lured back from Paris and sentenced to four years' imprisonment, it was not because he was in any way guilty, but on the ground that he knew what was going to happen and should have handed on the information. The real reason was that any party which was even to a mild extent in favour of reforms did not meet with the approval of the Gospodar. In his opinion it was necessary to reduce Radović to obedience; and Nikita used to try, without success, to force the innocent prisoner to beg for pardon. Since he declined to do so, he remained incarcerated with a large cannon-ball chained to his left leg. While he was in prison he corresponded with Danilo, and on being liberated was received by Nikita--they wept in each other's arms. Nikita fancied he was just the man to govern a progressive modern State. When he had the famous old warrior Pero publicly flogged by a criminal for having refused to degrade himself by flogging that same criminal, Nikita might plead that he was acting in the interests of discipline. When he confined his critics in the old Turkish fortress on the small, malarial island of Grimojuri, with the water oozing into the cells, he might plead that this was precisely the same curriculum as fell to the lot, at San Juan de Ulloa, of those who incurred the displeasure of Porfirio Diaz, the Mexican President--and Diaz had been almost worshipped (till his fall) by many Europeans. When Nikita drove one afternoon with friends of his to Nikšić and approvingly looked on while they destroyed the building and the whole machinery of Montenegro's weekly newspaper, which had departed from the paths of adulation--well, I see that his apologist, a certain Mr. A. Devine,[66] says that "in 1908 political passions resulted in the extinction of the organ of the political Opposition, _Narodna Misao_ ("The National Idea")."