from it or rather from the dominating man; if his place had been occupied by his afore-mentioned colleague, the burly and beloved Dušan Popović, there would have been in Zagreb a very much suaver atmosphere. But unfortunately Popović is a wealthy man, a highly successful lawyer who cares little for the tumult of politics.... It was a thorny problem, whether the State should be constituted on a federal or a centralized basis.[63] The federation of the United States depends on the centralization of political parties, whereas in Yugoslavia the parties have only just begun to combine. Feudalism in the German Empire rested on the predominance of Prussia, a position which the Serbs are, under present conditions, loth to occupy in Yugoslavia. In Germany, moreover, many of the States used to be independent, while in Yugoslavia this was only the case with Serbia and Montenegro. Centralism would tend to obliterate the tribal divisions, but on the other hand it brings in its train bureaucracy, which is slow, cumbrous and often corrupt; it demands unusually good central institutions and first-rate communications, neither of which are as yet in a satisfactory state. The constitution has arrived at a compromise between the federal and the centralized systems. A writer in the _Contemporary Review_ (November 1921) said that the division of the whole of Yugoslavia into some twenty administrative areas [he should have said thirty-three] to replace the racial areas, was a very drastic proposal to put forward; and he added that when the historic provincial divisions of France were broken up into departments, the nation had been prepared by nearly 200 years of centralization under the monarchy. It is a flaw in his argument to say that the previously existing areas were racial, whereas populations of identical race were divided from one another by the course of events. And in the proposed obliteration of these divisions--to be effected in a less arbitrary fashion than in France, where no account was taken of the former provinces--it can scarcely be maintained that, of itself, this part of the centralizing programme in Yugoslavia is so very drastic.