I have myself seen the tombs of the departed Christians and the departed Moslems of a Herzegovinian village gathered together in the same God’s acre, and separated only by a scarcely perceptible path. In many parts the Mahometan peasants have suffered almost as much oppression as their Christian neighbours, and during the present insurrection there have been instances in which they have made common cause with the Christian rayah. If this religious antagonism can once be overcome, there seem to be many hopeful elements left us even in Bosnia. The temperament of the Southern Sclaves is preëminently kindly and easy-going, and nothing but the interested wiles of the Osmanlì, to whom Bosnian union meant his own expulsion, could have checked the development of a spirit of toleration. We have in Bosnia a common language and a common national character born of the blood; and that national character, whatever may be said to the contrary, is not prone to revolution. It is slow, it is stubborn, it is not easily roused, and it possesses a fund of common sense which has led a keen French observer to compare the Serbian genius with the English.[143] The Bosniacs are of a temperament admirably fitted for parliamentary government, and what is more, owing to their still preserving the relics of the free institutions of the primitive Sclaves, they are familiar with its machinery. In their family-communities, in their village councils, the first principles of representative government are practised every day. Orderly government once established by the commanding influence which powerful neighbours could exercise for pacification if they chose, the development of the natural resources of the country would follow as a matter of course. I have elsewhere alluded to the fact that, besides supplying the Romans and the Ragusans in the Middle Ages with incalculable wealth of gold and silver, the Bosnian mountains are known to contain some of the richest veins of quicksilver in Europe; that iron and other ores are abundant, and that the valley of the principal river is one vast coal-bed. All these sources of wealth and prosperity, and consequent civilization, are at present, as I show elsewhere, inaccessible, owing simply to the corruption of Stamboul.