The Kansas City sun. (Kansas City, Mo.) 1908-1924, 1915-04-03

family of nations, and free
AVA dom has made her sturdiest
stands among its dreamy
crags and unproductive rock-strewn,
gravel slopes. Now, true to tradi-
tions of centuries of in%cessant war
ring, she has Joined in the world war,
with eagerness to expand in the to-
bacco and grazing lands of Herze-
govina. A picture of the strongly
individual characteristics OF this ma
ton, nurtured and contained upon a
mountain, whose entrance into the
war scales caused hardly a tremor of
the balance, has been prepared for the
National Geographic society by George
Higgins Moses, United States Minister
to Greece and Montenegro during 1909
1912. Surveying the history of the
miniature country, against which pow
erful Islamic waves broke in vain for
centuries, the writer says:
For 500 years they have main
tanned freedom, which of old has sat
upon the heights and, with sHfferings
indescribable, with courage illimit-
able, won from the great English
apostle of Balkan freedom those words
OF undying praise, in which he gave it
as his deliberate opinion that the
traditions of Montenegro exceed in
glory those of Marathon and Their
mopylae and all the war traditions of
the world" Everywhere within the
little kingdom, the writer says, one
can see memorials of the grim, un
broken struggle of Montenegro's peo-
pie against the power of the Turk. a
struggle in which the Turk, master
through the Balkans, battered against
the mountain heights to no avail.
Montenegro has little to invite ex-
cept the majesty Of the vista from its
higher crests, and the little band of
Slavs who fled hither had freedom
more than luxury and ease in mind. At
the creation, sc runs a Montenegro
legend given by Mr.. Moses, an angel
was sent forth to gather the superflu.
u stones on the earth's surface.
He placed these stones in a bag which
burst as he was flying over Cerna.
CORA, and Montenegro's richest dover
is still the rocks which the angel
spilled upon it.
Webbed With Fine Roads.
The approach to the kingdom, a
winding way up hill, is spoken of by
the writer as a splendid piece of en-
cheering, which weaves up the gaunt,
gray cliffs, finally threading a narrow,
easily-defended defile and crossing a
pass mostly swathed in clouds. Mon
tenegro, Mr.. Moses continues, is
webbed with fine roads, the expression
of the present kings restless spirit
for Improvement. The capital itself,
Cetinje, is hardly more than a knot of
cross-streets in two roads of this sys-
tenn. There are no %pretentious build
ings in the city, only two being of
more than two stories in height, the
Russian and Austrian legations. The
external life of the capital is simple
in the extreme.
Montenegrins, declares the writer,
are mostly of greater than average
stature. and the men have come to feel
their principal calling to be that of
war. The women of Montenegro are
its economic producers, and, to quote
King Nicholas, who has married his
delightful daughters to some of Eu-
ropes leading houses, the women are
the lands most important export. The
men, Mr. Jones says, are good work
ers when put to it, and whenever a
Montenegro applying for a job is
asked what he ear do, he invariably
answers, "Superintend."
There is little and almost
no manufactures in the kingdom.
whose lands are barely rich enough
to support the needs of the people in
the most simple manner. Good tobac-
CO is raised in the country, and a,few
coarse stuffs are woven in Podgoritza.
Nearly everything in use, however, is
imported, and duties and prices are
very high.