of General Martinovich as Premier only served to bring out the strength of the movement for unity, for the new Ministry also resigned in June after presenting a memorandum of similar tendency to those mentioned above.
The breach between the King and those entitled to speak on behalf of his people was now complete; a Montenegrin com- mittee for national union was formed in Switzerland, and repre- sentatives were appointed for the meeting at Corfu, which re- sulted in the Declaration of Corfu, July 20 1917, by which the delegates of all sections of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes agreed upon the establishment of a single kingdom under the sceptre of the Karageorgevich. The entry of the Allied troops into Montenegro after the defeat of the Austro-Bulgars was followed by steps to bring the resolutions of Corfu into effect. Elections were held for a " Great National Assembly " which, on Nov. 26 1918, proclaimed the deposition of King Nicholas and union with Serbia, the resolutions being confirmed at a popular mass-meeting convened at Cettigne by five former Prime Ministers. Allegations of coercion on the part of Serbian troops in the elections were negatived by an Allied commission under General Franchet d'Esperey, and the report of the subsequent investigation carried out by Count de Salis on behalf of the Supreme Council of the Allies was stated by the British Govern- ment to bear testimony to the fact that the Assembly represented national feeling. Some disorders broke out in consequence of the incursion of armed bands acting on behalf of Nicholas, and financed and organized in Italy, but, the number of Serbian troops in the country being very small, these bands were forced to retire by the Montenegrins themselves, the defence of its borders being purposely left to a Montenegrin militia.
The general elections to the Serb-Croat-Slovene Constituent Assembly were held on Nov. 28 1920, and in Montenegro resulted in the election of none but advocates of national union. These elections were observed on behalf of the British Government by Mr. Roland Bryce, who reported that they were held under conditions of scrupulous fairness, without coercion on the part of the administration of the triune kingdom, and that they represented the will of the people. The subsidies paid to, and the diplomatic recognition of, the " Government " of ex-King Nicholas were withdrawn by England and France, but Nicholas was still able to maintain a force of adherents at Gaeta, in Italy.
The ex-King died at Antibes March i 1921, and his entourage proclaimed the Crown Prince Danilo as King, but after six days the latter abdicated in favour of his nephew Michael, son of Prince Mirko, on the ground that his abstention from taking an active part in the war and his German marriage (with Duchess Jutta of Mecklenburg) made him persona non grata to the Allies. With the elections to the Constituent Assembly, however, the withdrawal of diplomatic recognition by Britain and France, and the disbanding in June 1921 of the " Monte- negrin Legion " which the Italian Government had maintained hitherto at Gaeta, the " Montenegrin question " was virtually closed; it had, in fact, only been kept open latterly as a means of bringing pressure to bear upon the Southern Slav Government in connexion with the Adriatic question, and, in spite of the say- ing " pays balkanique pays volcanique," the union of Monte- negro with its sister provinces seemed likely to endure. Thus the five centuries of struggle for independence and for the Serbian idea carried on by the " falcons " of the Black Moun- tain found its consummation in a realm as wide as, and more national than, the empire of Tsar Dushan.
AUTHORITIES. N.Forbes, The Balkans; Jovan Cviji6, La Peninsule Balkanique; R. W. Set9n-Watson, The Southern Slav Question; E. Denis, La Grande Serbie; The New Europe (weekly), various num- bers; White Papers, Cmd. 1123, 1124; A. Radovich, and others, The Question of Montenegro. (A. H. E. T.)
MONTERO RIOS, EUGENIO (1832-1914), Spanish politician, was born at Santiago de Compostela, Corunna, Nov. 13 1832. He had a distinguished career at the university of Santiago. He was elected to the chair of ecclesiastical discipline at the university of Oviedo, was transferred to a similar chair at Santiago, and thence passed to the chair of canonical law at the Central University, Madrid. His political career began with the foundation in Santiago of La Opinion Publica, a journal designed to reunite the scattered Progressist party. In 1869 he was elected deputy (Progressist) and showed himself in the Chamber a strong opponent of ultramontanism and a defender of democratic monarchy. He was Under-Secretary of the Min- istry of Grace and Justice in Zorrilla's administration and became the minister under Prim's, and whilst in office was instrumental in introducing civil marriage. Throughout the revolutionary period Montero.was the object of bitter attacks by the clerical parties. He continued to hold office during the short reign of Amadeo I. and drew up that King's act of abdica- tion, but held aloof from politics for some years after the ac- cession of Alphonso XII., occupying himself in legal studies. In 1872 he had been made a member of a commission for codi- fying criminal law, and later in life (1898) he was president of a section of the General Codification commission. In 1888 he was for a short time president of the Supreme Tribunal. Having held office in Herrera's Cabinet (1883) and Sagasta's (1885 and 1892-3), he became a member of the Senate in 1893 and its president 1894-5. He was chief of the Spanish delegation which negotiated the Treaty of Paris with the U.S. at the close of the Spanish- American War of 1898, being also in 1899 again president of the Senate. Throughout his political career he was regarded as one of the leading men in the Liberal party; from 1903 to 1906 he was its chief, and for a few months in 1905 he was prime minister. From 1909 until his death in 1914 he was again president of the Senate. He died at Madrid May 12 1914.
MONTESSORI SYSTEM. In connexion with the theory of education, one of the chief points of new interest during 1910-21 was the attention aroused by Dr. Maria Montessori's work. It is hardly too much to say that, since Froebel, no such stimulus has been given to a revolution in the elements of educational method as her success, from 1907 onwards, with the Case del Bambini in Rome; and the Montessori system has given a new direction to ideas upon child education.
Maria Montessori (b. 1870) came to the study of educational theory after a thorough training in practical medicine. She was the first woman to whom (in 1894) the university of Rome gave the degree of M.D., and as assistant doctor in the "psychiatry" clinic at the university she had become specially interested in the question of the treatment of the feeble-minded. At the Pedagogic Congress at Turin in 1898 she gave an address on this subject, which led the Italian Minister of Education, Signer Barcelli, to ask her to give a series of lectures to teachers in Rome; the result was the foundation of a new school for feeble-minded children, the Scuola Ortofrenica, of which she was made directress. Her ideas as to the proper way of awakening a defective intelligence had been founded on a study of what Dr. Itard, physician to the Institution for the Deaf and Dumb in Paris, had attempted early in the igth century in the case of the much-discussed " Wild Boy of Aveyron," and particularly of the later work of Edouard Seguin (1812-88), author of the Traitement des idiots (1846), who opened in 1839 the first school for idiots in France, and who in 1850 made his home in America and there did so much for the education of defective children. In carrying on Seguin's principles at the Scuola Ortofrenica for the two years that she was directress, Dr. Montessori had such remarkable success that it was borne in upon her that something must be wrong with the methods of education ordinarily applied to normal children. Idiots sent to her from the asylums were being taught to read and write so that they passed just as good examinations as pupils of the same age in the public schools; and, as she says, " while everyone was admiring the progress of my idiots, I was wondering what could keep the normal children on so low a plane." The reason, in her opinion, was clear; the children from the asylums, under her treatment, had been helped in their psychic development, while the normal children, taught by ordinary methods, were retarded. If the same methods were applied to good material that were successful with bad, much better results ought to be attainable; and she determined to investigate the whole subject afresh.
