A solution for each of these problems--the most difficult which
ever faced a nation--would have to be found; meanwhile the policy of the
four masters, the German, Venetian, Magyar, and Turk, would always be
"divide and rule," in other words, to perpetuate the divergencies.
II
The history of the evolution of the Jugo-Slavs from the sixteenth to the
twentieth century has been an effort to find the means of melting down
these differences until finally one--nationalism--accomplished the
purpose. Unity came first in the imagination and the mind, next in
literature and speech, and finally in political action. The four hundred
years beginning with the fifteenth and ending with the eighteenth century
will be remembered by the Jugo-Slavs as the age of humiliation. Only
Slavicized Ragusa and indomitable Montenegro kept alive the imagination
of the nation which was brought back to life by the half-religious,
half-national Slovene poets of the sixteenth century, by the Ragusan epic
poet [Gundulic], by the incessant demands of successive diets of the
ever-weakening Croatia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and by
the progressive and zealous Serbs of Hungary, who ever since the fifteenth
century in increasing numbers made their home there, refugees from the
oppression of the Turk, but who ever longed to push out from the frontier
and rebuild Serbia anew.
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