If some of the millions which are yearly wasted by the Austrian Government, as well as by others too, in building ironclads and exploding torpedoes, and in many other equally unreproductive undertakings, were spent on the coast of Dalmatia in planting olive trees on the side of those mountains as far up as they could flourish, then walnut trees, then chestnut trees, and finally oaks and firs, I think I can safely assert that in thirty years the full cost of the first outlay would be repaid, while the benefit to the country at large would be incalculable.
It is not in a book like this that the best modes for bringing about the cultivation of the Dalmatian shores of the Adriatic are to be discussed, but that it could be done and should be done, is undoubted; and not in Dalmatia alone, but also to the east of that country, in the lands beyond the Vellebitch, through Servia, and all that vast tract of country subject now to the impoverishing influence of Turkish mal-administration.
It always makes me sad when I think of those rich countries lying fallow for want of hands to cultivate them, and a good government to encourage industry, and when I see shipload after shipload of hard-working industrious Germans leaving Hamburg, Bremen, and other German ports, risking the perils, the inconveniences, and the expenses of their voluntary exile, traversing thousands of miles of ocean route to reach at last an unknown country, from which it is doubtful if they will ever have a chance of returning to their Fatherland; when those fertile lands of Servia lie at the very threshold of their country, with no sea to intervene, and only a few days of rail and river to go over. But the present state of things cannot continue for ever; and even now promising signs of amendment are not wanting. The monstrous anomaly of some of the richest lands of Christian Europe being still in this nineteenth century under the misrule of barbarous Asiatic hordes, whilst millions of wretched Christian inhabitants are kept in the most abject servitude, must ere long be done away with; and all those countries, Servia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Roumelia, and all lying between the Danube and the Adriatic must before very long be amalgamated under some one chief. Who the man may be upon whom the noble responsibility may fall of governing this future empire, it is impossible now to conjecture, for the several countries which would go to form this new dominion are still scattered and disorganized; but the great bond of a common language will soon unite them again, when the time comes, and probably that is not distant, for now we do in weeks what our forefathers did in centuries. When that moment shall come, I venture to hope, in the interest of this new country, that one totally unconnected with the present contending clans may assume the direction of affairs.