Zhivoi Kraji

Alexander of Jugoslavia, bespectacled Dictator-King, reached the age of 41 last week. His birthday was widely celebrated. In Belgrade 500 citizen delegates, brilliantly embroidered, pranced up and down the streets shouting Zhivoi Kralj! Zhivoi Kralj! (literally: "The King, let him live!") In the royal palace diplomats danced with Jugoslavian beauties. Troops marched and countermarched on the parade ground. Jugoslavian bunting draped public buildings. In New York Consul-General Radoye Yankovitch gave a birthday luncheon at which U. S. Minister to Jugoslavia John Dyneley Prince announced that "progress in Jugoslavia is rapid," and Dr. John H. Finley of the New York Times made the striking statement that "there is no better liberty than under a good King."

While reporters typed stories of this happy birthday, came other more sinister reports. In changing the title of his country from "The Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats & Slovenes" to the "Kingdom of Jugoslavia," Dictator-King Alexander has set boiling afresh a stew of acute racial feeling. In the Cathedral at Zagreb a sharp-eared sacristan discovered a ticking bomb timed to explode during the King's birthday mass. Railway employes fished a 60-lb. bomb off the tracks of the Zagreb-Belgrade railroad just before the special train of a royalist delegation was due to pass. In Zagreb railway station one Dr. Rittig, Croatian priest who had protested loyalty to Jugoslavia's new regime, was severely pummeled by an unidentified assailant before boarding his train. All newspapers publishing accounts of bomb findings or of Dr. Rittig's pummeling were confiscated. Seventeen cafe proprietors were marched to jail charged with "encouraging meetings of the so-called 'Frank Party.' " Cables from Jugoslavia explained the Frank partisans as members of a secret Croat nationalist organization, plotting Croatia's restoration to Hungary.

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