As I am at present completely cut off from my sorely-stricken country, I have been unable to apply for permission to quote from certain books that I have consulted, but I feel sure that my literary colleagues, Dr. Dragutin Prohaska, Niko Županić and Dr. Gjuro Šurmin, will not object to my having had recourse to their works in the interests of our race. I am also indebted to Mr. Frano Supilo, the leader to the Croatian people, as well as to my above-mentioned friend, Mr. Dimitrij Mitrinovič; of the Serbian Legation in London, for several valuable hints. My special thanks are due to my translator, Mme. Fanny S. Copeland, and Miss Ella C. Seyfang, who have given me invaluable assistance in my work. LONDON, THE AUTHOR. _November_, 1914. _PART I._ THE NORTHERN SLAVS. THE SLAV NATIONS. CHAPTER I. THE SLAV RACE. Slav Characteristics—Slav Power in the Past—The Decline—The Dawn? Although the Slav race does not appear as a united state or Union, it certainly forms a family of nations linked by ties of blood, the tradition of centuries, similar language and customs, and especially by ties of mutual love and sympathy. It is the greatest and most powerful of the European races, yet to this day it does not hold the pride of place which is its due and which it once held. Not the precedence of mere strength, which is surely sufficiently represented by Russia, but the place due to a people of recognized culture, who have not yet been justly appreciated in spite of overwhelming proof of their intellectual gifts. Slavs are still popularly supposed to be a mentally undeveloped host of semi-barbarians and troglodytes. Of course the educated public of Europe has long abandoned this attitude; but it has done little to spread a more just and liberal view among the people at large.[1] The German scholars made it their business to lay stress on “Slav barbarism” wherever possible, to obscure the bright and glorious pages in Slav history, and to emphasize everything that can be taken as a proof of savagery and arrested development. Unfortunately, no one has written at such length about the Slav question, or attached so much importance to it, as the German scholars, with the result that other European nations have derived their views from them—so much so that one might almost say that _German_ opinion on the Slavs has become the opinion of Europe. Constant unrest in Russia, and the consequent reprisals of the authorities afforded a welcome pretext for misjudging the Slavs, and the ordinary public of Europe came to know of them only as mediæval inquisitors with Siberia as their great torture-chamber. No one seemed to realize that these revolutionary movements, no less than the insurrections in other Slav countries, merely represented the resistance of a virile people craving enlightenment against autocratic barbarism; and that it is obviously unfair to judge the Slavs by the