It must at this time be recalled in what an extraordinary way the Serb race had fortuitously been broken up into a number of quite arbitrary political divisions.  Dalmatia (three per cent. of the population of which is Italian and all the rest Serb or Croat, preponderatingly Serb and Orthodox in the south and preponderating Croat or Roman Catholic in the north) was a province of Austria and sent deputies to the Reichsrath at Vienna; at the same time it was territorially isolated from Austria and had no direct railway connexion with any country except a narrow-gauge line into Bosnia.  Croatia and Slavonia, preponderatingly Roman Catholic, were lands of the Hungarian crown, and though they had a provincial pseudo-autonomous diet at Agram, the capital of Croatia, they sent deputies to the Hungarian parliament at Budapest.  Thus what had in the Middle Ages been known as the triune kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia, with a total Serbo-Croat population of three millions, was divided between Austria and Hungary.

Further, there were about 700,000 Serbs and Croats in the south of Hungary proper, cast and north of the Danube, known as the Banat and Ba[)c]ka, a district which during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was the hearth and home of Serb literature and education, but which later waned in importance in that respect as independent Serbia grew.  These Serbs were directly dependent on Budapest, the only autonomy they possessed being ecclesiastical.  Bosnia and Hercegovina, still nominally Turkish provinces, with a Slav population of nearly two million (850,000 Orthodox Serbs, 650,000 Mohammedan Serbs, and the rest Roman Catholics), were to all intents and purposes already imperial lands of Austria-Hungary, with a purely military and police administration; the shadow of Turkish sovereignty provided sufficient excuse to the de facto owners of these provinces not to grant the inhabitants parliamentary government or even genuine provincial autonomy.  The Serbs in Serbia numbered nearly three millions, those in Montenegro about a quarter of a million; while in Turkey, in what was known as Old Serbia (the sandjak of Novi-Pasar between Serbia and Montenegro and the vilayet of Korovo), and in parts of northern and central Macedonia, there were scattered another half million.  These last, of course, had no voice at all in the management of their own affairs.  Those in Montenegro lived under the patriarchal autocracy of Prince Nicholas, who had succeeded his uncle, Prince Danilo, in 1860, at the age of nineteen.  Though no other form of government could have turned the barren rocks of Montenegro into fertile pastures, many of the people grew restless with the restricted possibilities of a career which the mountain principality offered them, and in latter years migrated in large numbers to North and South America, whither emigration from Dalmatia and Croatia too had already readied serious proportions.  The Serbs in Serbia were the only ones who could claim