The reconstruction of South-Eastern Europe

SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE

a mute man, which even to-day is the name of Germans among all the Slav nations.

It was these thousands of years of peaceful life that moulded the Serbo-Croat character. The Serbo-Croat is sincere, peaceable, easily roused, but also very easily appeased, never gloomy, having always something childlike about him. These traits are the same even to-day, notwithstanding the long centuries of struggle and foreign oppression. The prehistoric home of the Serbo-Croat people is always mentioned in national folklore with love, and a dim feeling of longing, as all of us remember the happy days of childhood in our father’s house. Neither did the Serbo-Croats abandon their old home because they were moved by warlike ambitions or by desire for conquest.

Some fifteen centuries ago the old European civilisation, represented by the Roman Empire, was passing through a terrible crisis. The Mongolian tribes, Huns and Avars, bursting forth from Central Asia like a devastating whirlwind, overran Europe and drove before them other races and tribes. After the Huns had overrun the Slav territories and uprooted the Slav tribes from their native soil, the Serbo-Croatian tribes, avoiding a new Mongolian hurricane, abandoned the Galician plains and wooded Carpathian ranges and appeared on the borders of the Eastern Roman Empire. At their first appearance on the scene of the world’s history,

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