We generally imagine that the statesmen of South-Eastern Europe are a collection of rather swarthy, frock-coated personages who, when not engaged in decrying each other, are very busily occupied in feathering their own nests. If any one of them, at the outset of his career, had a sense of humour we suppose that in this heated atmosphere it must have long ago evaporated. But strangely enough, the two most prominent politicians in Yugoslavia, the venerable Pašić, the Prime Minister of this new State of Serbs and Croats and Slovenes, even as he used for years to be the autocrat of Serbia, and his opponent Stephen Radić are, both of them, by the grace of God, of a humorous disposition. Outwardly, there is not much resemblance between them: Pašić, the picture of a benevolent patriarch, letting fall in his deep voice a few casual words which bring down his critics' case, hopelessly down like a wounded aeroplane, and Radić the fervid little orator, the learned man, whose life has been devoted to the Croat peasants and who is said to find it difficult to make a speech that is under eight hours in length. Last year when the vigorous Pribičević, then Minister of the Interior, who is determined to compel the Serbs and the Croats straightway to live in the closest companionship, whereas Radić, supported by most of the Croat _intelligentsia_, argues that in view of their very different culture, the Serbs having enjoyed a Byzantine and the Croats an Austrian education, it would be advisable for these two branches of the South Slav nation to come gradually and not violently together,--last year when Radić was lying in prison on account of his subversive ideas Pribičević sent a message to say that he was prepared to adopt half his programme. And Radić sent back word regretting that the Minister could not adopt the whole of it and thus obtain for himself the Peasants' party. It is wrong to assert that this party is unpatriotic; the enemies of Yugoslavia, who welcome in Radić a disruptive element, are totally in error. Years ago he was working for the eventual union of Serbs and Croats--the Austrians imprisoned him because in 1903 he went to Belgrade at the accession of King Peter and made an admirable speech to this effect--and his present attitude is due to the impatient manner in which Mr. Pribičević and his friends are endeavouring to bring the union about. His peasants are a conservative people; they cannot instantly dispel the anti-Serb ideas which the Austrians for ever inculcated, nor the negative anti-Serb frame of mind which they learned from their own _intelligentsia_. It will take a little time before the Catholic peasant realizes that the Orthodox Serb is his brother and that now his military service will not be in an alien army, but in his own. "Let us go slowly," says Radić, "with our peasants"; and he knows them very well.... One is told that he changes his opinions from hour to hour; he is certainly very impetuous,