[18] Cf. Historical Geography of Europe, p. 70 (London, 1881).
[19] Ibid., p. 71.
[20] While I knew the honesty and truthfulness of McGahan too well ever to question his statements regarding the cruelties of the Turks which he so vividly described, I have never had any doubt that most of the atrocities that so shocked the world at the time were provoked by the people of the Balkans themselves. Serbs, Bulgars, and Greeks had organized a systematic propaganda for the dismemberment of Macedonia and “when those methods flagged a bomb would be thrown at, let us say, a Turkish official by an agent provocateur of one of the three players, inevitably resulting in the necessary massacre of innocent Turks, and an outcry in the European press.” Cf. Nevill Forbes, op. cit. p. 66.
“The Bulgarian Atrocities,” according to another well-informed writer, “were a clever and unscrupulous piece of diplomacy on the part of the Russian Foreign Office and of the Pan-Slavist Committees. In May, 1876, the Bulgarian Committees at Bukharest and Odessa organized an insurrection which broke out simultaneously in many of the large towns of Bulgaria, accompanied by abominable atrocities on Moslems, ‘designedly committed by the insurgents as being the means best calculated to bring on a general revolution in Bulgaria, by rendering the position of the Christians, however peaceably inclined, so intolerable under the indiscriminate retaliation which the governing race were sure to attempt, as to force them in self-defence to rise.’” W. E. D. Allen in The Turks in Europe, p. 166 (London, 1919).
[21] “Of all the men,” writes Forbes, “who have gained reputation as war correspondents I regard McGahan as the most brilliant.” “He used to be called ‘The Cossack correspondent’ because of the swiftness of his movements. Frank Millet names him ‘Will-o’-the-wisp of war writers.’ George Augustus Sala pronounced him one of the most cosmopolitan men he had ever met—‘a scholar, a linguist, a shrewd observer, a politician wholly free from party prejudice, a traveler as indefatigable as Schyler, as dashing as Barnaby, as dauntless as Stanley.’” “No man of his age in recent years,” avers his friend, Lieutenant Greene, “has done more to bring honor on the name of America throughout the length and breadth of Europe and far into Asia.—I suppose that he and Skobeleff stood at the head of their respective professions.
“Year after year the praises of this bold adventurer and vivid writer are chanted in rude verse by the peasants of the Balkans, and every year the anniversary of his premature death is commemorated by the singing of a requiem mass in the cathedral at Tirnovo, the ancient capital of Bulgaria. When he was riding among the Bulgarian villages in war time the peasants used to crowd about and kiss his hands, hailing him as their liberator, and there were many of the Bulgars who agitated for the choice of this wandering writer as the head of the principality whose creation his dispatches had done so much to establish.” Cf. Famous War Correspondents, Chap. IV (by F. L. Bullad, Boston, 1914).
[22] After Trajan had conquered the Dacians he established in the newly acquired territory a large body of Roman colonists. But they were by no means all of Latin blood, for they were drawn, according to Eutropius, from all parts of the Roman Empire—ex toto orbe romano. Numerous votive inscriptions found in the country show that among the colonists besides those from Italy, were representatives from Gaul, Germany, Dalmatia, Phrygia, Galatia, Africa, Egypt, and far-off Palmyra, But, notwithstanding this complexity of ethnical stock, it was always those of Latin blood and Latin speech that dominated.
[23] For an illuminating account, with a map, of this much discussed campaign of Darius against the Scythians, see The Geographical System of Herodotus, Vol. I, sec. 7, 8 (by J. Rennell, London, 1830). Cf. also The Five Great Monarchies, Vol. III, pp. 434, 435 (by G. Rawlinson, New York, 1881); The History of Herodotus, Melpomene, 87–143; E. H. Bunbury’s A History of Ancient Geography Among the Greeks and Romans from the earliest Ages till the Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. I., pp. 202–206, 217 (London, 1883).
[24] Cf. Le Danube, Aperçu historique, économique et politique, Chap. II (by C. I. Baicoianu, Paris, 1917).
[25] See Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.).