Master Josef and his fellows in Orsova did not hate the Servians with the bitterness manifested toward the Roumanians, yet they considered them as aliens and as dangerous conspirators against the public weal. "Who knows at what moment they may go over to the Russians?" was the constant cry. And in process of time they went, but although Master Josef had professed the utmost willingness to take up arms on such an occasion, it does not appear that he did it, doubtless preferring, on reflection, the quiet of his inn and his flask of white wine in the courtyard rather than an excursion among the trans-Danubian hills and the chances of an untoward fate at the point of a Servian knife. It is not astonishing that the two peoples do not understand each other, although only a strip of water separates their frontiers for a long stretch; for the difference in language and in its written form is a most effectual barrier to intercourse. The Servians learn something of the Hungarian dialects, since they come to till the rich lands of the Banat in the summer season. Bulgarians and Servians by thousands find employment in Hungary in summer, and return home when autumn sets in. But the dreams and ambitions of the two peoples have nothing in common. Servia looks longingly to Slavic unification, and is anxious to secure for herself a predominance in the new nation to be moulded out of the old scattered elements: Hungary believes that the consolidation of the Slavs would place her in a dangerous and humiliating position, and conspires day and night to compass exactly the reverse of Servian wishes. Thus the two countries are theoretically at peace and practically at war. While the conflict of 1877 was in progress collisions between Servian and Hungarian were of almost daily occurrence.
The Hungarian's intolerance of the Slav does not proceed from unworthy jealousy, but rather from an exaggerated idea of the importance of his own country, and of the evils which might befall it if the old Serb stock began to renew its ancient glory. In corners of Hungary, such as Orsova, the peasant imagines that his native land is the main world, and that the rest of Europe is an unnecessary and troublesome fringe around the edges of it. There is a story of a gentleman in Pesth who went to a dealer in maps and inquired for a _globus_ of Hungary, showing that he imagined it to be the whole round earth.