journalist had not been told that prior to the War this town of some
2000 inhabitants was provided with five schools in which not a single
child spoke Italian, and with one school subsidized by the Liga
Nazionale which--as in Albania--lured its pupils by gifts of clothing,
books, etc. The teachers, from the Trentino, knew not a word of
Serbo-Croat and the children not a word of Italian. But not very much
harm was done, as the population considered it shameful to attend this
school, and the bribes never succeeded in attracting more than thirty
pupils, even when money was paid to the parents. This institution was
reopened by the Italian army after the War, and presumably it is the one
which the American visited. I do not know whether the schoolmistress,
forewarned of his visit, had told the children in Serbo-Croat that a
gentleman would come and say something in Italian, whereupon they would
hold up their hands.
A DIGRESSION ON SIR ARTHUR EVANS
Seeing that the Adriatic problem, after all these months, had not been
solved but on the contrary had been allowed to spread its poison more
and more, one naturally wonders what was being done in Paris. The
Conference was fortunate enough to have at its disposal, after the
Armistice, the famous ethnologist and archæologist Sir Arthur Evans.
This gentleman, whose distinctions are too numerous to mention (Fellow
of Brasenose; twice President of the British Association; Keeper during
twenty-four years of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford; D.Litt.; LL.D.;
F.R.S.; P.S.A., and so forth), has for many years devoted himself to the
eastern Adriatic--the second edition of his _Through Bosnia and the
Herzegovina on Foot_ appeared in 1877, his _Illyrian Letters_ in 1878,
his _Slavs and European Civilization_ in the same year. He never ceased
from that time onward to study these matters. "I think," he says in a
letter to me from Youlbury, near Oxford, of which he kindly permits me
to make any use I like, "that in some ways I have more title to speak on
the Adriatic Question than any other Englishman, as Dalmatia was my
headquarters for some years. Neither did I approach the question with
any anti-Italian prejudices. I was so far recognized as a competent and
moderate authority that I was asked by the Royal Geographical Society to
give them a paper on the subject.... Anxious, with others friendly to
both sides, to secure an equitable agreement between the Italians and
Yugoslavs, I took part in a series of private conferences in London
which led to a preliminary Agreement forming the basis on which the
Congress at Rome approached the question. There the Agreement was
ratified and publicly approved by Orlando. How Sonnino proceeded to try
to wreck it, you will know. Finally (just before the Armistice, as it
happened) there was to have been a new Congress of Nationalities at
Paris, which I was asked to attend. It was stopped by the big Allies, as
matters were thought too critical, owing to the submission of Bulgaria.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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