DALMATIA
ITALY'S BONE OF CONTENTION
Venice is in Italy, 60.what was Venetian should be Italian. Thus runs the argument. Rome is in Italy, but the same reasoning leads to results, which make the boldest pause. Much of the mediaeval Venetian domain is Slav in race, and these Slavs are setting up a new State and pull away from Venice. It is pull race—pull history. Race is the team to back nowadays, but history has a strong pull too. When Rome more or less conquered the Balkan Peninsula she found ; various kinds 'of Greeks, whom she understood and could manage well; in the mountains a wild folk whom- she could make' nothing of, and to the north various peoples on the drift-Celts and Gerinanswho made good raw material for legions. The Slavs were not yet so far west. In these three groups we may see the three blocks of people into which ethnologists would divide Europeans—the Mediterranean, Alpine, and Nordic races. But the ethnologists, like pacifists, are exceptionally quarrelsome people, and best lett alone. Certainly nobody since the Romans has ever been able to make anything of the mountain folk, the true Albanians. The last unlmppy gentleman who tried was Prince William of Wied. lllyria, with its seaboard Dalmatia, was a provinco settled fa Republican times, and' extended .from the. Adriatic coast to what are now the eastern confines of Serbia. Its Roman tradition waa broken not-only by the enfeeblement ot tho arm of Rome, but by the establishment of' a Slav race—Croats and Slovenes -who settled over tho country as far as the coast in the seventh century. Throughout the Middlo Ages Dalmatia looked west and Venice looked east. Their glances met. In 998 tho people ot Dalmatia invited Venice to help them against pirates. (This invitation theme is as tiresomely repetitive in history as tho Wotan motive in the "Ring.") Iho Dogo Orseolo responded, and in return for his help was acclaimed Duka of Dalnmtia. , . , . Venetian the Adriatic remained,- and its eastern seaboard, too (though, _ oddly enough, Trieste was never part of veneun, but was part of the Holy Roman Empire), until Napoleon handed it over to Austria. Austrian it' nominally remained until three months ago, and- as such technically enemy territory. As enemy territory Italy claimed much ot Dalmatia as price of her alliance; but by the time that pledge came to be redeemed Dalmatia could no longer be counted as oneray territory, so ardent was the uprising of the Slav peoples against their Austrian lords, so undeni&blo their sot - vices to the common cause, 60 -just uiclr claim ,to unite with their Serbian brcthren in a South .Slav State. . Italy has not recognised Jugo-blavia, and does not want arbitration. She liobw to the Treaty of London of 1915, which was much simpler when Dalmatia was plain onemy. The Jugo-Slavs, strong in their prd-Allv record, have just now rnado largb and seomingly aggressive counter-claims. • _ Here is matter for the League of Nations to whet its statesmanship upon. Tf it can settle this,- it may contemplate even tho Banat without dismay.
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Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 190, 7 May 1919, Page 7
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512DALMATIA Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 190, 7 May 1919, Page 7
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