The free and independent kingdom of Serbia is undoubtedly the most important of the Southern Slav States, although she has only three and a half million inhabitants, and is shut in on all sides by her six neighbours—Austria-Hungary, Roumania, Bulgaria, Greece, Albania and Montenegro. In 1817 she was freed from the Turkish yoke, and in less than 100 years she has developed into a sturdy, self-reliant state, efficient in an intellectual, economic and military sense in spite of constant upheavals at home and abroad. For all she is and has achieved Serbia is indebted only to herself, to the capabilities, valour and perseverance of her own children. Russia was her only foreign protector. The Serb is a straight-dealing, industrious man, and, like all the Southern Slavs, essentially poetic. Judged by the standard of modern _school_ education the average Serbian peasant is perhaps not so very far advanced, and usually limits his accomplishments to reading and writing; but he is keenly observant, and his natural gifts and mother-wit are so great as to warrant a very different forecast for his future than exponents of German “Kultur” have so far predicted. Like the Russian and the Croat, the Serb is above all things a farmer, who loves his bit of black earth, and cultivates it with care; and from this love of the soil spring his pleasures, his shrewd philosophy, his large charity towards man and beast, and, above all, his love of truth and justice. Shall not all the world be just, even as the earth is just when she bestows or withholds her gifts? From time immemorial the Serb has had a great feeling for family ties and the bond of the community. The love he bears his own homestead he extends to that of his neighbour, and then in a wider sense to his whole country. Where his love of country is concerned, political and economic considerations take a second place. The Serb loves his country as a bridegroom his bride—passionately, often unreasonably, but never with calculation. He desires his beloved land for himself—to keep it untouched by strangers. In spite of considerable business capacity he is not aggressive, and does not covet his neighbour’s possessions. But, should his neighbour dare to move his fence even one inch over the boundary, or purposely let his cattle stray into his meadow, then the Serb becomes fierce, wrathful and unforgiving. The Serbian farmer has no need to study history in order to learn where his neighbours have removed his landmarks. His history lives in his songs and ballads, and goes back a thousand years. These poems tell him everything. Every one of his beautiful folk-songs is a piece of history, a bit of the past; and they sink deeper into his heart than any historical education. The _dates_ of his power, past splendour and decline are meaningless to him; but the sad, deeply-moving legends in his folk-songs, telling of his triumphs and his tragedies, plaintively