From the point of view of humanitarianism [as has been well said] it is beyond a doubt that much less blood was spilt in the Balkan Peninsula during the five hundred years of Turkish rule than during the five hundred years of Christian rule which preceded them; indeed it would have been difficult to spill more. It is also a pure illusion to think of the Turks as exceptionally brutal or cruel; they are just as good-natured and as good-humored as anybody else; it is only when their military and religious passions are aroused that they become more reckless and ferocious than other people. It was not the Turks who taught cruelty to the Christians of the Balkan Peninsula; the latter had nothing to learn in this respect.[14]
But, notwithstanding the long and trying ordeal through which the peoples of the Balkans have passed, a new era seems to be dawning for them at last. Education is receiving more attention and law and order are gradually assuring to the masses the blessings of civilized life. When, however, we think or speak of the Balkans and their inhabitants there are, as the distinguished British writer D. G. Hogarth reminds us, certain salutary things to bear in mind, among which is that “less than two hundred years ago England had its highwaymen on all roads and its smuggler dens and caravans, Scotland its caterans and Ireland its moonlighters.”[15]
As I viewed from the citadel the magnificent panorama that unfolded itself before me in the broad valleys of the Save and the Danube, I recalled certain alliterative verses which I was wont to recite in my youth, beginning with
An Austrian army awfully arrayed,
Boldly by battery besieged Belgrade,
Cossack, commander, cannonading come,
Deal devastation; dire destructive doom.[16]
While gazing at the sun-bathed vineyards, ruin-crowned heights and broad, verdant plains which followed one another in rapid succession as our steamer bore us seawards, I was especially impressed by the multiplicity of languages I heard spoken by the passengers. For among my fellow travelers were Germans, French, Turks, Serbs, Croats, Russians, Bulgarians, Roumanians, Greeks, Albanians, Italians, Poles, Slovaks, English, and Americans, and probably several others whom I did not recognize. There was, indeed, a Babel of tongues such as one would scarcely find elsewhere. How the famous polyglot, Mezzofanti, would have reveled in such a gathering where he could have held converse with all of them, as he was wont to do with the students of the Propaganda, in Rome, who came from all parts of the world and with the languages of all whom the illustrious Cardinal was perfectly familiar.[17]