When Serbia began her life as an independent State, she was still bleeding from the many wounds inflicted upon her through centuries of slavery, and first of all these wounds had to be tended. The Serbian nation, intellectually and economically bankrupt from long Turkish misrule, was in the position of a merchant—an honest fellow, but robbed to his last farthing, whose ruined shop is being restored to him, and who is expected to work up the old business to its former prosperity out of these ruins. Years had to elapse ere the people got accustomed to the new order of things, and, out of the welter of beginnings, found the way to sound civic development. In those days Serbia fell a victim to every political infantile disease, but on the other hand she was inspired with a poetic, truly Slav patriotism. Their golden freedom, which they had so long yearned and fought for, and had now at last won, affected the nation not as a political event but as a great _family festival_, in which all the members were united in love and joy. They _revelled_ in their new-found freedom; the sordid considerations of the day were put off till the morrow, or left to the care of a small body of “cold-blooded” men. Civic law and order, and regularity in the administration—unheard of under Turkish rule—were first looked upon as purely miraculous, and then tacitly accepted as the inevitable consequences of freedom. The idea of a _free State_ is only of theoretical value to the Serbs, the main thing for them is that they should be a _free people_. As a free people they followed their leaders—not as superiors, but as children obey their fathers. With childlike simplicity they gathered round their rural magistrate to hear his instructions, and in the same spirit they assembled under the ancient plane-tree in the Topchider Park to hear Miloš, their first Gospodar and Prince, dispense wise counsel and even-handed justice. But in these council-meetings between ruler and people was sown the seed of the true constitution of the State, and, like the empire of Dušan Silni in days gone by, modern Serbia has grown up out of her own people. And this is why Serbia is an _eminently nationalistic_ state, free and independent of foreign influence. Perhaps in some ways this has been a drawback, but it has also been a great source of strength to Serbia. The intimate connection between the reigning house and the people proved a bulwark against foreign attempts at denationalization, and gave Serbia the necessary strength to keep herself free from Germany’s corroding influence to this day.