The Slav service in the church became after a time Exarchist; as a sequel to which, to the dissatisfaction of many of the people, it was called "Bulgarian." The objectors had been to Serbia and sympathized with that country, and at Ghevgeli they were supported by about half the population. But the Bulgars were then more favourably viewed by the Turkish authorities.... A Bulgarian school was likewise opened a few years before the Serbian, which began in 1882. By this time the Slavs, largely owing to external pressure, were not content to have two separate schools; they were the keenest rivals, and the proprietor of the Serbian school, Risto Naumović, was killed for no other reason in 1883. His successor, one Bečirović, who is still alive, was threatened that he would be shot within twenty-four hours, but his valiant young son—who was then a pupil at the school—found the komitadji chieftain who had uttered this threat and slew him. So both the schools continued, together with a Turkish, a Greek, a Roumanian and a Catholic school. The Catholic friars were supported by Austria and France; the Roumanian establishment, which was visited by not more than twenty children from the neighbourhood, was maintained by Roumania—the teacher being a native of Bucharest. In fact, there was a good deal of propaganda which between the Serbs and the Bulgars became violent.

What can be said for the Exarchists?... Some years ago the Albanians in the region of Monastir were asking to be inscribed on the books of the American Church, for they thought in that way to obtain the benefits of American citizenship. They made no pretence of having been impressed by other doctrines. A Church was in their eyes a sort of naturalization bureau. And when the Exarchists were rejoicing in their new-found strength and perceiving that this Church of theirs might be a corner-stone of a Great Bulgaria, they were so completely carried away that they bestowed an all-too-scant attention on the methods which they brought to bear. These methods of the enthusiastic Exarchists were altogether deplorable and succeeded in alienating not only the Patriarchist Slavs whom they freely murdered, but even in many cases the very Exarchists, who came to dislike the komitadji bands, whom they were required to shelter and to feed and to assist with a subscription to their funds. "Still more," says a Bulgarian proverb—"still more than if you have a boat on the sea or a Roumanian wife, are you certain to sleep ill if you have a property in Macedonia." As year after year went by and the komitadji men appeared to be doing very little beyond terrorizing the country, those who supported them began to frown. No guerilla leader presented a balance-sheet, and it was generally known that the famous Boris Sarafoff allowed himself, each year, a few months in Paris. This, he said, was due to him after his arduous time in the Macedonian mountains. More and more displeased were the Exarchist peasants—the Macedonian Slav is a very thrifty soul—and in the Great War one had the spectacle of men who called themselves Bulgars and concealed their sons, lest they be taken into the Bulgarian army. "If it pleases the Bulgars," they said, "let them come and liberate us."

VERSATILITY OF THESE MACEDONIAN SLAVS

If the Exarchist leaders had gone about their business with more prudence—but how could one expect political sagacity among a people which had not only been for centuries under the shadow of the Horses' Tails, but which at the time when the Turk appeared was no whit his superior in civilization? Very possibly the Balkan Slavs would in those five hundred years have turned in disgust from Vlad the Impaler and other exponents of Byzantine culture, if it had not been for the Turk, who ignored his raia's potential moral progress and did not think of regulating his natural cruelty. If the Exarchist leaders had been born different, then Macedonia might easily have become—as now, one hopes, it will at last become—a Yugoslav bond of union, instead of an apple of discord. "I used to be a Bulgar and now I am a Serb,"[54] said a man with whom I was walking one day in Monastir, "and so long as I have work," he said, "I shall be perfectly contented." How many Macedonians ought to echo his words! At Resan I stayed at the house of an old gentleman called Lapchević and in Sofia I had previously met his brother, whose name was Lapchev and who was Minister of War. Until 1868 there was at Resan only a Greek school, so that the elder brother's education left him merely a Macedonian Slav, who could have become with equal facility a Serb or a Bulgar; the younger brother had the advantage of a Bulgarian school, but the disadvantage of having his Slav nationality narrowed down into that of Bulgaria. These two brothers should set an example, renounce the name of Serb and Bulgar, and call themselves simply Yugoslav. At Resan the Serbian authorities are certainly trying to smooth away these wretched divisions. No longer, as in 1890, does the little town support half a dozen schoolmasters who are nothing if not Serb or Bulgarian. Now the Serbs of Resan have retained not only the priests who were in office during the Bulgarian occupation, but the male and female Bulgarian teachers. In the winter of 1869 Ljuben Karaveloff started his paper, the Svoboda, which was in opposition to those Bulgars who dreamed of their country being freed by Russia and placed under a Russian protectorate. Karaveloff's hopes were centred on an independent revolutionary movement, and the Bulgars, he urged, could best achieve their political, as distinct from their ecclesiastical, freedom by associating themselves with the other Balkan peoples and especially with the Serbs. "What is required," he said, "of the Balkan Christians is union and union and union."

HOW FOREIGNERS HAVE STIRRED UP TROUBLE

If you stand, soon after daybreak, looking at the white façade of Sofia's enormous, Russian-built cathedral, you will perceive that whether accidentally or by some architectural tour de force, the upper part is a majestic face, the face of some old god, benevolent and quite implacable. The Bulgars never would deny that Russia liberated them and showered on them every kind of gift. But woe be it to them if in return they did not forward Russia's purposes. Hundreds of young Bulgars were received in Russia and gratuitously educated; the Church books which the Bulgars used, their ecclesiastical vestments and sacred utensils had usually come to them as gifts from Russia; both before and after the political emancipation Russia's literature was most assiduously studied. And a pious care was taken of the places around Plevna that were memorable for a feat of Russian arms; the people down to this day speak about "The Holy Places." All was well until the death of Alexander II. No, all was not well—for the Russians had, in their design to make the Bulgars their devoted Balkan agents, given them by the Treaty of San Stefano a vast territory which in gratitude they were expected to administer for Russia's greater glory. Yes, it may be said, but Russia was using the best available maps, and these indicated that Macedonia was Bulgarian.... Perhaps we have already shown sufficiently that the Macedonian Slavs are devoid of an innate national sense, but that they have Bulgar or Serb sentiments which are, for the most part, imported, thrust upon them or created by the propagandists. Very rapidly the Macedonian Slavs transform themselves into Serbs or Bulgars; according to circumstances they will or will not be faithful to the nationality which they have chosen. And in their wavering they have thousands of precedents—towards 1400, for example, a Slav chieftain called Bogoja attacked the town of Arta, and in order to gain an easier victory announced, the chroniclers tell us, that he was of Serb, Albanian, Bulgar and Greek descent. One must therefore be a little dubious of maps which ascribe the Macedonian Slavs to any particular nationality. Much more than the rival maps, it was Kiepert's that was used by the Russians and others for determining the Bulgaria of San Stefano. "It is the best map that we know of," said Bismarck, and Kiepert's ethnographical statements were completely adopted by British scientists and diplomats at the time of the Berlin Congress. No doubt a well-equipped foreigner could obtain more exact ethnographical results in Macedonia than equally gifted Serb or Bulgar observers. But not one of the travellers whose observations Kiepert used for his map was acquainted with the Serb or the Bulgar language, nor had any one of them travelled for purposes of research; hence it is not surprising that none of them perceived that the Macedonian Slavs have no sense of nationality and that "Bulgar" is not used there as a national term. In former as well as in recent times the Macedonian Slavs have readily abandoned one name for the other, the temporary predominance of either depending solely on the conquests, political circumstances and various events, internal and external, which give rise to certain sentiments and instincts among this people, easily transforming them into Serb or Bulgar aspirations. It seems clear that Serbia's existence as an independent State for a good many decades before Bulgaria was freed would render the name of Serb more disagreeable to the Turk; it is therefore not astonishing that in Macedonia under the Turks one discarded the Serb name in favour of the Bulgar. Without dwelling upon the more or less valuable remarks which were made by priests and monks and Turkish geographers and French explorers and German doctors from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and from which we can at least deduce that the Slav inhabitants of southern Macedonia were not fanatically constant to the Bulgar name, it would appear that in the nineteenth century the earlier deliverance of Serbia and, above all, the foundation of the Exarchate caused the Bulgar name to become the more popular. The Serbs were looked upon by Turkey as a revolutionary element, while the Bulgars aimed at an independent Slav Church within the limits of the Turkish boundaries. It is unnecessary to add that after Bulgaria's deliverance and her annexation of Eastern Roumelia, and especially after the rebellious movements in Macedonia, which had the moral if not the official encouragement of the Principality, there was less eagerness on the part of the Slavs to let their Turkish masters think that they were Bulgars. But in the period preceding the publication of Kiepert's map the Bulgar name was the more fashionable with Macedonian peasants. And by giving practical effect to this map in the Treaty of San Stefano the Russians did a huge disservice to the Bulgars. In the first place, they aroused in this young people such an exhilaration that the subsequent annulling of the Treaty at the hands of the Great Powers would naturally leave a rankling disappointment. Also the relations between Serbs and Bulgars were not rendered easier by the chief Slav nation coming down so heavily upon the Bulgar side in what necessitated a most delicate and scientific handling. Three Russian ethnographical maps on Macedonia were issued by the Petrograd Slavyansko Obštčestvo, which worked for Pan-Slavism and assisted Slav students. These maps—one of them is described by Kntchev, the chauvinistic Bulgar, as "giving the Bulgars somewhat more territory than they in reality occupy"—were lamentably superficial. While remaining unnoticed in the rest of Europe they exercised an unfortunate influence on the Balkan educated classes, who believed that, according to tradition, the potent "elder brother" would be anxious to decide righteously the disputes between the small Balkan nations. These maps were, no doubt wrongly, looked upon as the plans of Russian policy, and on this account the Bulgars became still more unapproachable for an understanding or for united work; it appeared to the Macedonian intelligentsia, whose hope was to see their country set free, that Bulgaria was the land which fortune and the Russians favoured. Except the foundation of the Bulgarian Exarchate in Macedonia and the creation of Bulgaria at San Stefano, perhaps nothing contributed so much to the estrangement of the Balkan nations as these maps; for it was long before one could be persuaded that this Slav society had produced the maps through ignorance and false information, so that, as Professor Cvijić remarks,[55] "the educated classes in Serbia were as culpable for the pernicious effects of these maps as were the Russian authors themselves." And Serbs and Bulgars had good reason to complain of the manner in which Russia treated them.

AUSTRIAN, RUSSIAN AND TURKISH MANŒUVRES

While Bulgaria came from the San Stefano peace dazzled with jewels that she was not to clasp, the Serbs continued walking in the shadows which had, from the time of Michael's death, been gradually falling round them. No practical result was obtained from a letter which the Serbian Government ordered their representative to read to the Greek Patriarch, pointing out that only such parishes should be held as unquestionably Bulgarian which had formerly been subject to the Patriarchate of Trnovo, even as those of the Peć Patriarchate were undoubtedly Serbian, while those of Ochrida were disputable, since that region had belonged in turn to both of them. Small advantage accrued to the Serbs from their fidelity to the Greek Patriarch: in Macedonia they came to be regarded by many Slavs as foes to the new national Church, while the only desire of the Greeks was to use them for their own purposes. "There are no Serbs in this parish," wrote a Bishop when the Patriarch commanded him to permit the Serbian priests now and then to celebrate a Slav service, "there are no Serbs but merely Greeks" (in which official terminology the Serbs were included) "and hellenized Vlachs." ... The Serbs about this time were most unfortunate in warfare. Prince Milan tried to secure, without coming to blows, from the Sultan what he expected that his victorious armies would give him, namely, the administration of Bosnia-Herzegovina. After the failure of the 1874 crops the peasants of Herzegovina and then of Bosnia were driven to desperation by the demands of the tax-gatherers. Miss Irby's eloquent description[56] tells us of the terrible state of these provinces during the years that preceded the outbreak. Taxes of one-eighth were demanded by the Governor, one-third or one-half by the Beg, taxes for exemption from military service, taxes for pigs, cattle and everything "you have or have not." One informant said, "I have seen men driven into pigsties and shut up there in cold and hunger till they paid; hung from the rafters with their heads downwards in the smoke, until they disclosed where their little stores were hidden. I have known them hung from trees and water poured down them in the freezing cold; I have known them chained barefoot and forced to run behind the Beg's carriage...." The provinces revolted and vengeance was wrecked upon them. More than a third of the population fled the country. Sir Arthur Evans[57] describes the refugees as a "squalid, half-naked swarm of women and children and old men, with faces literally eaten away with hunger and disease.... After seeing every moral mutilation," he goes on to say, "that centuries of tyranny could inflict ... who can go away without a feeling of despair for the present generation of refugee Bosnia?" The people of Montenegro and Serbia were profoundly stirred by the miseries of their brothers. But Milan vacillated, and when finally he took up arms it was without success, and five weeks after the peace signature Russia began the Turkish War, one of whose necessary antecedents was the recognition by Russia that the Austrians were not to be hampered in Bosnia-Herzegovina. (After the Treaty of Berlin had placed the two provinces under Austria's administration it is said that Andrássy, on his return from Berlin, remarked to Francis Joseph that the door of the Balkans was now open to His Majesty. But the Russian delegate, Prince Gortchakoff, had prophesied to Andrássy that Bosnia-Herzegovina would prove the Empire's grave.) One effect produced by this incursion of the Austrian eagles was a serious divergence between the Croats and the Serbs. By historic and by ethnic rights the provinces, so the Serbs argued, should be theirs when once the Turk had ceased to rule. The Croats, laying special emphasis on the religious question, were for justifying Austria's occupation. The Catholic Slav clergy, unlike the Orthodox, ranged themselves with the great Catholic Power; while Croat politicians of the school of Starčević invoked other historic and ethnic sanctions in their endeavour to found, under the name of "Great Croatia," a State uniting all the Yugoslav lands of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Thus the Serbs and their Croatian brothers were acutely in conflict. Never, said the Serbs, would that "Trialism" come to pass, for the Magyars would veto the formation of a Yugoslav State within the Empire, having a population roughly equal in numbers to its own. We Yugoslavs have nothing to hope for, said the Serbs, except from ourselves, and, being divided, we are ruining our common interests.... From yet another quarter was a storm-wind blowing on the Serbs. The Russian volunteers and officers had taken back with them highly unfavourable impressions as to the capabilities of the Serbian army, which they accompanied in the luckless campaign of 1876; also, in the opinion of the Pan-Slavists the Serbs had been contaminated by European civilization, whereas the Bulgars seemed, in the words of Professor Miliukoff,[58] to be the sons of an untouched, virgin soil, free from politics and ready to work, with all possible zeal for the "inner truth" of Pan-Slavism, while begging its protector to concern herself with the "outer truth." The Bulgars were, for these reasons, to have the preference in the allotment of the spoils of the Turkish War; and, owing to the conflicting demands of Russia and Prince Milan, Serbia did not declare war against Turkey until several days after the fall of Plevna, so that she could not hope that the Russians would show any special tenderness towards her national aspirations. It is difficult to see what Serbia could have hoped to gain from the elder brother, if she had been less dilatory; she gained from this intervention no vast gratitude from the younger brother. Men may still be found in Bulgarian frontier villages who were prominent there during the Serbian army's régime. Some of the officers seem to have told the people that they ought no longer to call themselves Bulgars, since they were Serbs; but the propaganda was very mild. Serbian schools were opened here and there, but if no pupils wished to attend them, the schoolmasters had a holiday; and the occupying troops limited themselves to collecting signatures on addresses of loyalty to Prince Milan. No one, probably, thought that the addresses and petitions were very serious—no one, that is to say, except a Dalmatian publicist called Spiridon Gopčević, who printed a large number of them in his handsome, illustrated book, Makedonien und Alt-Serbien (Vienna, 1889). With regard to Gopčević as a savant—he says that all the Macedonian Slavs are Serbs—and there are equally uncompromising Bulgarian authors—the celebrated Slavist Jagić says that he is sorry for the good paper which was used for Gopčević's book. Another of his wonderful discoveries was that the Macedonian Slavs are Croats. And one of his severest judges is a Croat, S. Jurinić. He gives, as if they were most valuable, these fatuous lists of signatures and informs us that some Bulgarian priests and agitators tried to prevent them being collected. A Turkish official did, it is true, show in too Oriental a fashion that he disapproved of these collectors—on July 16, 1878, he quartered one Cvetković-Božinče on the road between Skoplje and Kumanovo for having obtained 5000 signatures; and after quartering him, the Turk nailed the four parts of his body, each with a quarter of the petition tied to it, on to four posts at a place where four roads met. But many of the more reasonable Bulgars appear to have recognized that these activities of some Serbian officers and others need certainly not embroil the two people; while some other manifestations of joy, such as when they pulled out the beard of the priest of Pirot, and after nightfall, in celebration of this triumph, illuminated the town, those and similar transactions were treated as the folly of exuberant subalterns; and Tako Peyeff of Trn, the spokesman of the little, far-away town and its representative at San Stefano, told me that although he refused to sign petitions, yet he said that if Prince Milan should visit Trn it was the duty of all men to salute him. Up to this time, then, there was no veritable friction—there was only the cloud gathering over Macedonia; and even when the Berlin Congress of 1879 adjudged certain towns to Serbia, as a recompense for the abandonment of any claims on Bosnia, this was rightly taken by most Bulgars as being far less the fault of Serbia than of Austria and the other Powers. It is strange, in fact, that this difficult passage in Serbia's history was marked by greater animus between Serb and Croat than between Serb and Bulgar—and the Serbs were standing in Bulgaria. Milan had not yet made his ill-omened remark that the road to Sarajevo went via Sofia.

THE DEPLORABLE MILAN

One of the direst misfortunes that ever came upon Serbia was Milan, her fickle, headstrong, extravagant ruler. He was, perhaps, no Serb at all; it had been given out, when he came as a child from Roumania, that he was the grandson of the younger brother of Miloš, but this statement was not universally accepted—he lived under the suspicion of being an illegitimate son of the Roumanian Prince—and at his first appearance before the Skupština a certain Ranko Tajsić, a deputy, refused to rise. "I want that man's birth certificate!" he shouted. It is not surprising that Milan did his best to make, from that time onwards, Ranko's life a burden. If the Prince had been a more satisfactory monarch, his origin would have mattered little. Many of his attributes seem to his detractors to be peculiarly Roumanian, although it is true that extravagance is not unknown in Serbia, and this was the foible which his subjects, even when they learned the colossal amount of his debts, were most willing to overlook. It was only after his death that the secret treaty of alliance between himself and his paymasters, the Austro-Hungarian Government, became known; but the people, and especially the educated classes, were in opposition to his politics, and the conflict between him and the Radical party degenerated into a revolt that was suppressed by the sword. The leaders of the party fled from Serbia: Pašić, who was for so many years to be Prime Minister, settled in Bulgaria where he practised his profession of railway engineer.... As a benignant-looking patriarch Nicholas Pašić was for a long time the solitary Serb with whom the well-informed public of the rest of Europe was familiar. And of course upon his countrymen, whose fortunes he directed through years of shadow and sunshine, his hold was tremendous. "May God bless our dear old brother Nikky," says the peasant as he tastes his morning glass of rakia. There is no brilliance but a profound knowledge of human nature in this humorous old Balkan gentleman. It is not by brilliant oratory that he sways the Skupština, for he merely thinks aloud; slowly and haltingly, while he caresses his beautiful white beard, the words come out in a very bass voice—it is a grave and confidential talk, although a merry gleam occasionally dances in his eyes. With such homeliness does he talk that he pays no strict regard to the complications of Serbian grammar—when he appointed a very able young official of the Ministry of Education to a diplomatic post some hostile critics in the Press asserted that he did so on account of his enormous admiration for a man who had produced eight books on grammar. As a specimen of Pašić's parliamentary methods we may quote from a speech that he made in answer to one by the aforementioned Tajsić, who was an illiterate but most eloquent peasant. For three hours Tajsić had railed against the secret fund, the 30 million dinars that were every year at the disposal of the Foreign Office. At last when Pašić gets up and very courteously smiles at the would-be reformer: "Well, well," says he, "as to what our friend has told us—the—how should I say?—well, it is not altogether wrong—in a way, the—what was his name?—when you examine the matter from all sides, there is—I forget the word—in a way, these non-public matters, you know—how should I say?—it is best—how should I say?——" "Are you satisfied with His Excellency's answer?" says Nikolić, the Speaker. And Tajsić puts it to himself that after all he is only a peasant and Pašić is an Excellency and he must know better what one should do. This habit of stroking his beard used to be adopted by the Prime Minister when his personal finances were under discussion. Doubtless there were many who scented something scandalous in the fact that he possessed half the shares in the Bor copper mines, which had risen from 500 to 80,000 dinars apiece. He had bought them, as anybody else might have done. "Ah well," he was wont to say in that ultra-deep voice, "you see my wife brought them me." And a large contribution to his wealth was made by a farmer near Kragujevac; he persuaded Pašić to buy from him for 1000 piastres—a few pounds—a meadow on which to put his horses, and subsequently on that meadow there was found an excellent spring of mineral water. Once for a change another political leader, whose Christian name was also Nicholas, thought he would pull the beard of Pašić, and he did so very vehemently just outside Kolarac, which is a large restaurant in Belgrade. The Prime Minister was being followed by a couple of detectives, but he signed to them that they were not to interfere. "My darling old Nikky," said he, as he beamed at his assailant and grasped him tightly round the throat, "you and I are party leaders, so please don't let us quarrel. It creates an unfortunate impression, my friend." And it was some weeks before this man recovered, for Pašić was then about sixty years of age and still in the flower of his strength. But to return to the disastrous reign of Milan.