Our Belgrade correspondent sent us, on March 21, on the eve of the resignation of the Pachitch Cabinet, the following information, which clarifies the origin of the crisis:

In the last weeks of last year, Mr. Davidovitch, former President of the Council and leader of the Democratic Party, laid the foundations of a new bloc with Mr. Korosec, leader of the Slovenian populist party, and Mr. Spaho, leader of the Bosnian Muslim group. The goal of the coalition was the overthrow of the ruling party and the advent of a Cabinet which would include elements of the bloc, under the presidency of a democrat (Mr. Demo Davidovitch).

But democrats, populists and Bosnian Muslims barely have 90 votes against the 120 to 130 currently available to the government, counting not only the radicals, but also the Djemiet (Muslims of southern Serbia), i.e. 14 votes, and a few dissidents.

The necessary support to return the majority could only be requested from the Republican-Democratic Peasant Party, which has never come to Parliament and whose leader, Mr. Raditch, is currently holding its meetings in Vienna. The "raditchists" agreed to send to Belgrade the number of deputies necessary to defeat the government, on the condition that this maneuver would not imply, for the party, any essential change of orientation or general tactics.

Let us note, in passing, that despite their reservations, Mr. Raditch and his friends are making a gesture of capital importance. After declaring for three years that the Parliament sitting in Belgrade is an illegal assembly and having invested themselves with the pompous title of "Croatian national representation", they decided to submit their mandates to the formalities of validation. As they can only sit after having taken the oath, their change of heart amounts to recognition, if not of the Constitution of Vidov-dan, at least of the regime and the State.

It is therefore, under the appearance of an occasional maneuver, the effective participation of the Croatian peasant party in the political and parliamentary life of the kingdom. This is also what the Chamber understood, since it validated without discussion and unanimously the first twenty mandates that this party presented for verification. These twenty mandates regularized, the radichists filed thirty-four others.

Abroad, there is a tendency to simplify this struggle of the Yugoslav parties into the traditional formula: centralism or federalism. And, pushing the simplification to the extreme, we identify Serbian influence with centralism, and Croatian and Slovenian aims with autonomism or federalism. This is an exaggeration.

What are the current aspirations of the parties with regard to the external form of the State?
Mr. Raditch calls for a “fundamental, sincere agreement, free from any pressure or violence, between Serbs and Croats, an agreement respecting the age-old individuality (sic) of the Croats. But he always refrained from going into details on the economics of this agreement.

Mr. Korosec's populists aim for legislative autonomy for Slovenia; they would very well admit a centralist regime in other regions, where their members are in decline.

Bosnian Muslims (apart from the Maglailitch group and members of the Democratic and Radical parties) demand autonomy for Bosnia.

The agrarians, who voted against the Constitution of Vidov-dan, have never spoken openly, since this vote, in favor of the revision; Above all, they aspire to social legislation which places more emphasis on the agricultural element.

As for the fraction of Democrats most inclined to concessions, or the fraction of congresspeople, they only envisage a slight alteration to the Constitution, without undermining the principle of unity. Radical or democratic anti-revisionists admit all reforms which can, within the limits of the Constitution, improve the administrative system and cooperate in the economic recovery of the country.

It should be noted that, in the struggle which preceded the vote on the Constitution of Vidov-dan, the unitarian intransigence did not come from the Serbs of Serbia, but from the democrats or radicals originating from the Croatian or Slovenian regions. Mr. Pribitchevitch, standard bearer, at that time, of the centralist forces, is a Serb, but a Serb from Croatia.

Even today, it is Mr. Davidovitch, a Serb from Serbia, who embodies the tendencies towards conciliation with the autonomists, while the democratic deputies of Croatian origin remain attached to a rigid form of centralism. In the radical party, it is also on the side of the Serbian Serbs that we would find the most accommodating elements.

This amounts to saying that the current situation is very complex and that, if the struggle appears today to be limited between the radical party and the opposition bloc led by the Democrats, the future may bring about unexpected groupings.