Both in Bulgaria and Serbia the rights of the commune are very jealously safeguarded. The central government must take no part in the administration of the communes, or maintain any agents of its own to interfere with their affairs. The commune forms the basis of the State fabric and enjoys a complete autonomy. It is the smallest unit in the administrative organisation of the country. Every district is subdivided into communes, which are either urban or rural. The commune is a corporation. Every subject must belong to a commune and figure in its registers, the laws not tolerating the state of vagrancy. The members of the Commune Council are elected by universal suffrage, in the same way and subject to the same precautions as the members of the National Assembly. In passing it may be observed that theoretically the governments of the Balkan States are free democracies. Practically they are oligarchies tempered by assassination, which is still a favoured political weapon.
The Serbian has not much of the commercial faculty: and people of other nations manage very many of the businesses in Serbia.
The Montenegrin is willing to be a worker if it does not interfere with his manly amusements of warfare. His occupations are pastoral and agricultural pursuits and the chase. The Albanian is not content to be a worker at all under any conditions. His occupations are dancing and swaggering whilst his womenfolk carry on the bulk of the primitive pastoral and agricultural work.
It is not possible to hope for much industrial or commercial progress in Albania. But in Serbia and Bulgaria there are rich opportunities for enterprise and capital provided that an era of peace could be reckoned upon. It is the uncertainty on that point that will stand in the way of future Balkan development. When after the Treaty of London the Balkan League fell to pieces there was incurred, in addition to other sacrifices, a serious loss of confidence on the part of European capital.
CHAPTER X
THE FUTURE OF THE BALKANS
We have seen that a blood-mist has hung over the Balkans during all the centuries that history knows. Nature set up there lists for the great contests of races—on the path from the cold north of Europe to the warm south; on the path from Asia to Europe; and each great campaign left behind it shreds of devastated peoples. These shreds of peoples dwelling in the Balkans to-day have a blood-thirst as an inescapable heritage. Turk, Bulgar, Serb, Roumanian, Greek—they may hold the peace for a time, and some may try to think that they are friends with others; but all have something of hate or fear or contempt for the others, and all prepare in peace for the next fight.
The Fates making the Balkan Peninsula the battle-ground of empires and races, the field of last stands, the refuge of residual fragments of peoples, imposed upon it its bloody tradition. Under other conditions, Serb or Bulgar or Greek or Turk or Roumanian left to themselves might have made happier history. For all these races can be human, reasonable, companionable. I have seen something of all of them in following a Balkan campaign as a war correspondent (not following always as the sheltered guest of an army, but forcing a solitary path through the peasant population), and in watching the wonderful acrobatic lying of a Balkan Peace Conference have seen thus the best and the worst of them. I have been an unofficial member of a Bulgarian court-martial; the guest of a dozen and more Bulgarian and Serbian army outposts, dependent often for food and shelter on the kindness of peasant soldiers; for days have held at the mercy of Balkan peasants my life and my property; have been mistaken for a wandering Turk twice, and have never suffered violence, rudeness, or the loss of a pennyworth. For the peasants, the commonfolk of all the Balkan peoples, I have come thus to a hearty liking; their priests and politicians (with a few exceptions), a different feeling. Knowing that the massacre is the national sport in many districts of the Balkans; that at the outbreak of the 1912 war the death-rate by violence actually decreased in some quarters because the killing was systematised a little and put under a sort of regulation; that always Turks and Exarchate Christians and Patriarchate Christians are plotting against one another new raids and murders, still I maintain that, if left to themselves, if freed from the prompting of priests and politicians the Balkan peasants of any race are quite decent folk. So I wish heartily that there was fair reason to hope for peace and happiness for them. Is there fair reason? To that question a study of the races and the personalities can give clues for an answer.