Original sentence: According to Vladko Maček, the establishment of the state was greeted with approval by the middle classes and the intelligentsia who had become disillusioned with Yugoslavia, but the peasantry reacted with suspicion.The concession of an autonomous Croat province, the Banovina of Croatia, had been too recent (1939) to offset the friction that had marked the last decade under the absolutist regime of the Yugoslav king which has terrorized Croats
Edited sentence: According to Maček the new state was greeted with a "wave of enthusiasm" in Zagreb, often by people "blinded and intoxicated" by the fact that the Germans had "gift-wrapped their occupation under the euphemistic title of Independent State of Croatia".But in the villages, he wrote, the peasantry believed that "their struggle over the past 30 years to become masters of their homes and their country had suffered a tremendous setback".Vladko Maček: In the Struggle for Freedom, Robert Speller & Sons, New York,1957