It was during his stay there that he met the well-known Balkan travellers, Miss Irby and Miss Muir Mackenzie. They had been up and down the Peninsula in 1862 and 1863, making very exhaustive inquiries that were the basis of their book.[48] In 1917 Professor Ivan Shishmanoff discovered two letters of Miss Muir Mackenzie's in Sofia and published them in Sbornik. The first is dated May 12, and is in German. "Since we have been here we have made the acquaintance of Mr. Rakovski," she writes. "He has been so kind as to teach me Serbian, during Miss Irby's illness. We like him very much, and I know of no one among the Slavs with whose opinion we so entirely agree; because he does not think as a Serbian or yet a Montenegrin or a Croat or a Bulgar, but as a Slav.... I can't tell you how much I fear that their internal divisions will make impossible the realization of a Yugoslav country. One can't hope for much from the Greeks; they have exorbitant ambitions and neither private nor public integrity. Those are bad faults to find in an ally. And they speak openly of a Byzantine Empire! And reckon that all the Southern Slavs, Serbs as well as Bulgars, belong to them.... I hope that England will some day assure herself that there are other Christians in the East besides the Greeks."

THE YUGOSLAV NAME

Miss Muir Mackenzie's other letter, of June 23, is addressed to Rakovski from Bolsover Castle, Chesterfield. It is written in French. "We attach great importance," she says, "to the name Yugoslav. By means of crying that word in the ears of the Greeks one will succeed in making them understand that the Bulgars are Slavs. By means of crying it in the ears of the European diplomats one will succeed by making them comprehend that one cannot ignore a people of ten or twelve million souls. By means of crying 'We are Yugoslavs,' the Yugoslavs themselves will succeed in forgetting their little distinctions of environment and race, and in conducting themselves as a nation worthy of the name. Let us therefore cry that word—we will make people speak of it sooner or later."

In June 1863 Rakovski was at Cetinje, but as he was requesting subsidies he did not find a very sympathetic audience in Nikita. Thence he passed to Bucharest, where he issued—for ten numbers—a Bulgaro-Roumanian newspaper; the Bulgars in Bucharest had grown too prosperous to be interested either in his journalistic or his military schemes, and he found the Bulgarian colonies in Russia equally obtuse. He was attacked by consumption while he was at work upon the Provisional Law for the National Bands in the Forests—a sort of written constitution for the heiduks, and in the intervals of his last sufferings he wrote a history of the heiduks from the days of the Turkish conquest. He died on October 20, 1867.

The statesmen who then governed the Great Powers may have deprecated Rakovski as much as he deprecated them. It must have been exasperating for those solid persons subsequently to acknowledge—if they did so—that this unbalanced agitator weighed them very well. But the Balkan countries were too weak; they had to suffer being thrown aside, pushed here and there, and trampled on; for when the Great Powers came down to the Balkans they could really not pay much attention to the little peoples of the country and at the same time keep their eyes upon each other. Afterwards the Balkan countries found that it was better for them when the Great Powers fought each other there than when they came to friendly understandings. It was profitable and diverting for Albania when the Austrians and the Italians glowered at each other in that silent land: it was terrible in 1878 for Bosnia and Herzegovina when the Great Powers were on such good terms with one another that they allowed one of themselves to make off with those two waifs of whom he was not even the wicked uncle.

Russia had been taking a keen interest in the Balkans after Austria's disaster in 1859 at Sadowa. It was then that Prince Gortchakoff and his colleagues in the Ministry were inspired by the doctrines of Katkoff, who in his Moscow Gazette exercised much authority over public opinion and even over the Tzar. Panslavism, according to Debidour,[49] which a short time ago had been shivering in the background, lifted its head proudly and spoke of the new era which holy Russia was about to inaugurate, of the sacred mission that was incumbent on the Tzar. And the sanctity was greater in that it was not to be defined by merely mediæval but by modern language; the Tzar must not alone protect all those who practised his religion, he must be a patron saint who patronizes.

RUSSIA AND AUSTRIA SOW DISCORD IN THE BALKANS

To this end committees, in Moscow and in Petrograd, deliberated; newspapers and pamphlets spread their views; agile agents propagated them throughout the Balkans, calling on the Bulgars and the Bosniaks to rise, promising aggrandizements to Serbia and Montenegro, spurring on the fiery Cretans to make their revolt of 1866. All promised well. There was to be a Balkan federation formed at the expense of Austria and the Porte: Serbia would receive the Voivodina and Bosnia, Montenegro would acquire Herzegovina, the Croats would at least annex Dalmatia, and the Slovenes and the Bulgars would come naturally into this united Yugoslavia, under Michael's sceptre. He was at the time not only in most cordial relations with the Bulgars, but in 1867 he began pourparlers to ally himself with Greece, and he made overtures to the new sovereign of Roumania, Charles of Hohenzollern. And after this plan also had been nullified by Michael's death, the Russians still continued with their task, but now they had to deal with a convalescent Austria. It came to pass that the Bulgars found themselves in Russia's sphere, the Serbs in that of Austria. The little countries were thus violently pulled apart, and naturally each of them began to stretch their hands out to the neighbouring Slavs who were in servitude, but yet they managed to keep hand in hand with one another. The young men, such as Karaveloff and Tzankoff, whom Prince Michael sent to Western Europe to be educated, the young Bulgarian priests who had studied in that branch of the Belgrade seminary which Prince Michael opened for them, and all the Serbs and Bulgars who considered their two countries knew that, for political and economic reasons, they must not be kept apart. But there was always a Great Power to frustrate these designs. Yet even after they had been flung at each other in the fratricidal days of 1885, even after their attempt in 1905 to found a Customs union had been vetoed, even after some of their so-called intelligentsia had done what injury they could by harping on the limitations from which they naturally, like the older peoples, are not exempt—nevertheless, as it was seen in 1912, when the demonstrations of delight in Belgrade and in Sofia were touching, they are only too glad to fulfil their destiny. Since 1912 that misguided intelligentsia has been given a large store of fresh ammunition. They will go on firing and firing, while the people, including the real intelligentsia, will be better engaged.

THE MACEDONIAN SLAVS UNDER THEIR GREEK CLERGY

The name of Tzankoff brings to mind a strange ecclesiastical movement. The reader may remember how the little Macedonian town of Kukuš carried from its church the books in Greek and how it welcomed the Bulgarian monk who sang the Mass in Slav. The bishops and the clergy of the Greek Church had not made themselves beloved in Macedonia, where the population was indisputably much more Slav. Greek villages were very scarce to the north of Lake Castoria; but after the suppression of the two Slav Patriarchates in the eighteenth century the only Christians who lead a dignified existence were the Greek clergy. Among the Slav upper class there was a good deal of Hellenization; to be a Greek was of much social value. But the people generally stayed intact, because the schools so thoughtfully provided by the Greeks were solely for the boys. The language spoken in the home would therefore still be Slav. And it is not likely that the people would have cherished their Greek clergy, even if they had been archangels, when once the national awakening had begun. But what we hear about this clergy is too seldom of a pleasing character. The children of the Macedonian peasants might go into ecstasies on seeing one of these episcopal processions, with the bishop's glorious white horse and harness such as they had never dreamed of, with his footmen round about him and with all those other priests, the old ones and the young ones and the monks, and then the bishop's doctor and some other men in spectacles, and then the bishop's cook and a few more monks. But the Macedonian villagers who had to entertain all this rapacious brood and pay terrific fees for everything—250 piastres for a liturgy, 500 for a whole service, 500 for marriages among relatives up to the seventh degree, large contributions under the name of charity, and so forth—these had only rancour for the Church. Perhaps the saintliest among the Greeks declined to go to Macedonia. One hears of them so little and of people like Meletios so much. This savage person was appointed in 1859 to be Bishop of Ochrida, although the reputation he had left there—having previously been the coadjutor—was atrocious. Protests and entreaties were sent to Constantinople, but from 1860 until 1869 he stayed at Ochrida and carried on an implacable duel with his flock. He was frequently received with hisses, sometimes he was struck by stones, sometimes he was flung out of a church. But he was not the man to be intimidated—a large man, with broad shoulders, an arrogant expression and a bristling beard; they say he had the appearance of a janissary in clerical garb. He took into his service an Albanian bandit, through whom he terrorized the diocese. At one time he had the young wife of a man who was away in Roumania brought into his harem. The husband returned, asked for his wife and succeeded in obtaining her, but after two months he was assassinated, and the widow thought she might as well allow the bishop to console her. The outcry was enormous; no one doubted that it was Meletios who had given orders for the crime. A deputation of thirty went to lay this case and numerous other transgressions before the Patriarch at Constantinople. He would only receive five delegates, who read their document in a plenary sitting of the Holy Synod. After they had recited the afore-mentioned episode, one of the bishops who was present lost patience and, "Is it really worth our while to listen to such tales?" he asked. "If Christ spoke to the Samaritan woman, why should not a simple bishop hold converse with a woman also?" "At last the moment has come!" said the delegates. They departed, and at the door they shook the dust from their feet. The Patriarch himself ran after them. "Come back, my children!" he cried. But they were deaf to his voice.