Both Serbs and Croats have deserved more conciliatory and understanding leadership than they have received since the war. History had treated them very differently, and once they were united in a Jugoslav national state every resource of statesmanship should have been exercised to ease over their psychological and material dissimilarities. Writers have made much of the religious gap between Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs, and of the former's use of the Latin alphabet and the latter's of the Cryillic. The fact remains that they are of the same race, speak the same language, and for generations dreamed of union and worked for it.