Except at Kola[vs]in, where a few friends of Nikita tried their brigand
tactics, there was perfect calm in Montenegro during the elections. As
elsewhere in Yugoslavia, there was a general amnesty and a prohibition,
for the three preceding days, to sell wine or rakia. The ten elected
candidates, all of them for the Yugoslav union and against Nikita, were
equally divided between Radicals and Democrats on the one hand and
Communists and Republicans on the other. The authorities took not the
slightest step to favour any candidate; various prominent deputies, such
as Dr. Yoyi['c], the Minister of Food Supply, were beaten. And in a
letter to the Press we were told by Mr. Ronald M'Neill, M.P., that these
elections were certainly both "farcical and fraudulent." He is
contradicted by Mr. Roland Bryce, who, after his excellent work on the
Allied Plebiscite Commission in Carinthia, was sent by the Foreign
Office with Major L. E. Ottley to report on the Montenegrin elections.
He says (in Command Paper I., 124) that "in actual practice the method
of voting prescribed by the electoral law was found to ensure absolute
secrecy (the system adopted being the only feasible one in a country
where the proportion of illiterates is great), and the manner in which
the ballot was supervised and carried out was unimpeachable and proof
against the most exacting criticism." Mr. M'Neill is also contradicted
by the Republican candidate, M. Gjonovi['c], who in a manifesto drawn up
after the election declares that "none can say that the elections were
not free, or that anyone who wished could not make up a list. At the
elections only the lists and boxes of the Republicans, Democrats,
Independents, Radicals and Communists were represented. All of these
parties had in their programmes the motto 'The people and State union,'
with, of course, different points of view and different opinions as to
the organization of our national and State forces, except the
Communists, who go further and desire the union of all peoples."