Considered industrially the Bulgarian is the best type in the Balkans. He is a steady, tireless worker on the soil; takes to factory life amiably; and has in a very strongly marked degree "the road-making talent."
A very valuable index to national character is provided by a people's roads. The most successful Imperial governors, the Romans, were also builders of the finest roads the world has known. The British people have been good road-builders as well as good Empire-makers; the French people, too, and every other people who at any time have done big enduring work in the government of the world. If a nation is not a good road-building nation it will not go far: and the converse is probably true. On this road-building test the Bulgarians have a prosperous future indicated, for they are very pertinacious and skilful road-builders. During the 1912 war I noticed that despite all other pre-occupations they were pushing roads forward at every possible opportunity. The Turks going back to Adrianople and Kirk Kilisse found a great number of roads built or building—the first serious efforts in that direction since the downfall of the Roman Empire.
The Bulgarian's chief occupation is agriculture. The system of land tenures is that of peasant ownership. There are no large estates and very few non-occupying landlords. The chief crops are wheat, barley, maize, rice (around Philippopolis), tobacco, and roses. The tobacco is of as good quality, almost, as that of Turkey. The Bulgarian Government encourages the culture of tobacco by distributing seed, free of cost, among the planters, by setting a bounty on the export tariff, and by authorising the Bulgarian National Bank to consent to loans on the surety of certificates granted to the planters until they are able to dispose of their crops advantageously.
Tobacco culture is carried on chiefly in the south and in the provinces of Silistria and Kustendil. The area of the plantations is estimated at 3000 hectares. The province of Haskovo has the greatest yield; then follows Philippopolis, with 300,000 kilograms; Kustendil and Silistria, 210,000 kilograms. According to approximate calculations based on various statistics, three-fourths of the tobacco crop of Bulgaria is consumed by the inhabitants and only a quarter is exported.
The rose crop is next in importance after tobacco. The roses are used exclusively for the distilling of attar of roses. The rose gardens are limited to 148 parishes of the provinces of Philippopolis and Stara Zagora, and occupy a total area of 5094 hectares. The quantity and quality of the attar depend very much on the weather at the time of bloom and gathering. The roses most cultivated in Bulgaria are the red rose (Rosa damascena) and the white rose (Rosa alba). The best gardens are at Kazanlik, Karlovo, Klissoura, and Stara Zagora. The distilling of the attar is now a Government monopoly. The cultivation of beetroot has been introduced recently and is confined to the province of Sofia. The sugar refinery near Sofia utilises the whole crop for local consumption.
It is interesting to note in connection with Balkan agriculture that as far back as 1863 the much-abused Turk had actually adopted the very modern idea of an agricultural Credit Foncier system in the Balkans! In that year Midhat Pasha, Governor of the Danubian Vilayet, prepared a scheme for the creation of banks, to assist the rural population. The scheme having been approved by the Turkish Government, several of these banks were established. The peasants were allowed to repay in kind the loans which were advanced to them, the banks themselves selling the agricultural products. With the object of increasing the capital of the banks, a special tax was introduced obliging the farmers to hand every year to these institutions part of their produce in kind.
When it was realised that these banks were of great service to the rural population, to which they advanced money at 12 per cent interest—instead of 30-100 per cent, as the usurers generally did—the Turkish Government extended the reform to the whole Turkish Empire, and obliged the peasants to create similar banks in all the district centres. According to their statutes one-third of the net profits of these banks was destined for works of public utility, such as bridges, roads, fountains, schools, etc., while the remaining two-thirds went to increase the capital of the banks.
During the Russo-Turkish war several of these banks lost their funds, the functionaries of the Turkish Government having carried away all the cash, as well as the securities and other property belonging to the banks' clients. After the war the debtors refused to pay, and only part of the property of the banks was restored, by means of the issue of new bonds. For that unfortunate end the war is rather to be blamed than the Turk. This Credit Foncier system is pretty clear proof that the Turkish power was not always cruel and rapacious, since so sensible a reform was set on foot in one of the Christian provinces under the Sublime Porte.
Apart from the industries of the soil, Bulgaria has a small mining population and an increasing factory population. The Protective tariff is used freely to encourage young industries, and there is an effort just now to set up cotton-spinning as a national enterprise.
Serbia had a mixed pastoral and agricultural population up to the outbreak of the war of 1912, with pig-raising as the greatest of the national industries. By the Treaty of Bucharest she has, however, acquired much new territory, and is now probably predominantly an agricultural country. She has, too, great mineral resources at present, but they are little developed, and fine forests which only need an improvement of the means of communication to be commercially a big asset. The Serbian is not so steadily devoted to his work as the Bulgarian: his is the pastoral as opposed to the agricultural character. Nevertheless he has a reasonable faculty of industry. As is the case in Bulgaria the bulk of the land is held by peasant proprietors. These are organised into communes very much on the Russian system. It is an interesting fact that though in Serbia there is almost the same degree as in Bulgaria of seclusion of the women of the nation, a Serbian woman may be the head of the village commune, and, as such, exercise a very real authority.