Broadly then, while Russia gave us an example of the poor success of an attempt to fasten a State organization on a population deeply immersed in localism and traditionalism but settled and cultivating the land, the Balkan Peninsula illustrates tragically the weaknesses of competing attempts to fasten State organizations on a population, parts of which have as yet barely reached the stage of settlement. The difficulties within the Peninsula are undoubtedly enhanced by the sharp contrasts between the highland interior and the coastal fringe on which for milleniums already the influences of Crete and Babylon, Phoenicia, Greece and Rome have been playing. It is a Mediterranean fringe with its hoe cultivation and olive-trees already long established as the successors of an ancient barley culture, and it has trade as such a long-standing secondary feature of its life that observers not infrequently mistake it for the primary one. Roman ideas have spread along the Istrian and Dalmatian shores, and, in spite of Slavonizing influences, have remained strong at Zara, Fiume, and Trieste, while, though Croatia and Slavonia have remained Slavonic, their religion has become Roman Catholic and their alphabet western. It thus comes about that a not very deep difference of language between the Slav regions of Serbia, on the one hand, and of Slavonia and Croatia on the other is emphasized because the one uses the Cyrillic alphabet, the others the western, and each has its systems of schools on a religious basis, a serious problem for the new State of Yugoslavia. It is probable that the recent settlement of the {84} Adriatic quarrel between Italy and Yugoslavia represents a fair compromise so far as the two are concerned.