and cultural consciousness. In the absence of a native nobility, but with
unusual economic opportunities at their command, they developed a wealthy
middle class--a rare thing among Slavs before the middle of the nineteenth
century. This class came into contact with nationalized western Europe and
found that the bulwark against national oppression was education for the
masses. The nation must be educated and must be economically sound in order
to undertake the political struggle against the Germans, the Magyars, and
the Turks. That was the background of Dositej Obradovi[c]'s literary labors
as he raised spoken Serbian ultimately to the literary language of the
Jugo-Slavs and of Karad[z]i[c]'s efforts which resulted in that wonderful
collection of Serbian national poems, and which clinched for all time the
literary supremacy of the _[S]to_ dialect. Serbian Hungary was the starting
place for Kara George's revolution which brought partial freedom in 1804
and autonomy in 1830 and thus planted the germ of the modern Greater
Serbia. Napoleon's Illyria, created in 1809, joined for the first time
Slovenes and Croats in one political unit, and the excellent administration
and the schools left an undying memory of what might be if the Habsburgs
cared. Vodnik, the Slovene poet, sang of Illyria and her creator, but it
was the meteoric Croat, Ljudevit Gaj, in the thirties, who so eloquently
idealized it as he poured heated rhetoric into the camp of the Magyars, who
after the Diet of 1825 began their unfortunate policy of Magyarization.
Illyria, though short-lived, became the germ of the Greater Croatia idea,
which, with Greater Serbia, existed as the two, not necessarily hostile,
solutions of the Jugo-Slav problem down to the Congress of Berlin. It was
as yet a friendly rivalry with the possible formation of two separate
units. The occupation of Bosnia in 1878 led to actual friction between
them. On the other hand, the annexation of the same province in 1908 had
just the opposite effect, for from that time the ultimate ideal was
no longer Greater Croatia or Greater Serbia in any selfish sense, but
Jugo-slavia, because, to use a platitude, Bosnia had scrambled the eggs.