[Footnote 32: There are in the Banat some ultra-patriotic Magyars, such as the man at Antanfalva (Kovačiča) who, having lost something between his house and the post office, insisted on advertising for it in the Buda-Pest papers. But the Yugoslav rule was so satisfactory that, two or three years after the Armistice, I found in the large Hungarian village of Debelyacsa--where the _intelligentsia_ called the sympathetic Serbian notary by his Christian name--not one of the inhabitants proposed to remove to Hungary. No doubt the goodness of the soil had something to do with this decision, but, more, the liberal methods of the Serbs. No military service was as yet exacted--all that the Magyars had been asked to do was to work for two months in obliterating the ravages of war. The priest and the schoolmaster who had come from Hungary before the War still exercised their functions, and--in contrast with what had previously been the case--both the Magyar and the Serbian language were taught, the latter from the third class upwards. Altogether there was perfect harmony between the Magyars and the Serbs; when I was there the only racial question which occupied the Magyar farmers was the resolve of their _intelligentsia_ to have, as centre-half in the football team, not a Magyar but a more skilful Jewish player.] [Footnote 33: The Southern Slavs generally acknowledged that the Foreign Office was bound to behave to Italy, one of the Great Powers, with a certain deference. They also recognize that the Foreign Office is not actuated by malevolence if she treats Belgrade as she did Morocco, when in place of the strikingly appropriate and picturesque appointment of Sir Richard Burton our Legation there was occupied by one of a series of diplomatic automata. After all, these automata, who have spent more or less laborious years in the service, have to be deposited somewhere. But if one does not demand of the Foreign Office that she should make a rule of sending to the Balkans, where the personal factor is so important, such a man as the brilliant O'Beirne, who during the War was dispatched too late to Bulgaria, yet a moderate level should be maintained--it has happened before now that we have been represented in a Balkan country by a Minister who, some time after his arrival, had not read a Treaty dealing with those people and of which Great Britain was one of the high contracting parties; when taxed with this omission the aforesaid Minister hung his head like a guilty schoolboy.] [Footnote 34: October 13, 1921.]