But even were these obstacles overcome, there are others of a political nature fatal at the very outset to such enterprises. To take a single instance. Over the hills to the south-east of Foinica, near the Franciscan monastery of Kreševo, are veins of cinnabar and quicksilver, which have been estimated to be as rich as any in Europe. So rich in fact are they, that a German company were tempted to believe that, despite the expenses of preliminary road-making and outlay of another kind, it might pay to work them. But a concession must first be obtained at Stamboul, and nothing can be obtained at that sink of all human corruption without copious bribery. The company began in good spirits; they made first one ‘present’ and then another; but months passed, the demands of the Sultan’s ‘advisers’ grew more and more exorbitant, and the prospect of obtaining the required permission more remote, till, seeing themselves in a fair way to be ruined before they could begin, they gave up their enterprise as hopeless. Precisely the same causes have prevented the working of the vast coal measures of the Bosna! There is one remarkable phenomenon in connection with these ore-bearing districts, which must strike anyone who examines the distribution of population in Bosnia; and that is, that these former centres of mining activity are at the present day the strongholds of the Roman Catholic population of the country. Can it be merely accidental that three of the chief Roman Catholic monasteries in the country—Foinica, Kreševo, and Sutiska—are each placed in the very focus of the richest mineral areas in the province?[228] No, surely, it is not fortuitous. It is rather the result of a chain of causes, reaching far back into the past, and which, if I read them rightly, are explanatory of much that is most characteristic and least intelligible in Bosnian history. Stated baldly, I cannot doubt that the presence of the Catholic population and their monastic seats in the mining districts of Bosnia is ultimately due to the Roman conquest, or—if we may single out a man—to Q. Asinius Pollio. Cui laurus æternos honores Dalmatico peperit triumpho. There seems no good reason for doubting that many of these deserted mines, such as those that scar the mountain sides about Foinica, were the work of Roman miners. A Roman road, for example, has been traced almost to the western foot of this range, connecting it with Dalmatia. In the time of the Romans no less than 50 lbs. of gold was turned out daily by these Illyrian miners, and despatched to Rome by the Provost of the Dalmatian treasury[229] at Salona.