There are no paupers in Servia, and therefore no need of almshouses. There is a free hospital for both military and civilian patients, which is well kept.
Three miles from town, a park called Topschider, reached by a line of electric cars, surrounds a country palace in which King Michael lived much of his time. There is a farm where he conducted experiments in agriculture and horticulture. In the upper rooms of the palace are cases containing his library of agricultural works, many of which are in English; glass jars filled with seeds which he imported from foreign countries for experimental purposes, and glass cases containing wax casts of apples, pears, peaches, grapes and other fruits which he raised. Here he lived the life of a farmer and devoted his time to studying the interests of his people; and here he was assassinated by conspirators who were not allowed to have the share they wanted in the control of the government.
The park is very pretty, and in front of the palace is a group of noble old sycamores, one of which is said to be the largest tree in Europe. Its branches extend over a diameter of more than two hundred feet and are sustained by props. We paced it and made it thirty paces from the trunk to the tip of the outermost branch. The trunk is twenty-two feet in circumference, and the tree is perfectly healthy and symmetrical.
The house, or palace, so called, is rude and uncomfortable. There is nothing attractive about it. The rooms are dark, dismal and ill-furnished, but it was the favorite residence of King Milos and of King Michael who were men of primitive tastes. Milos died in an upper chamber he used to occupy, and everything remains as he left it—his bed, his clothing, his slippers and a tattered old dressing-gown hanging on a nail.
PART IV
Bosnia
PART IV
BOSNIA
XIV
A REMARKABLE EXAMPLE OF ADMINISTRATION
The problem which is puzzling the United States in the Philippine Islands should give our people a particular interest in the little state of Bosnia, where a similar situation has been successfully handled by the Austrians. From 1463 to 1878 Bosnia and Herzegovina were a part of the Turkish Empire, and are nominally so still, although under Austrian authority. While subject to the Turks, they practically vanished from the current of civilization. Scarcely a ray of light or progress brightened the intellectual, social and industrial stagnation that settled upon these people until 1875, when, exasperated by extortion, taxation, robbery, rapine, murder and religious persecution, they rose in rebellion. Upon the failure of the Sultan to restore order, the great Powers of Europe, at the Berlin Conference of 1878, placed the two provinces under the protection of Austria, although still requiring them to pay tribute to Turkey.
The success of the Austrians has been chiefly due to the methods adopted by Count von Kallay, the able Hungarian statesman who has been practically a dictator since 1878. For Austria to reconcile a proud people of different races and religions was no easy task. The results speak volumes for the forbearance and tact shown by the officials, and demonstrate the practicability of governing an alien race by justice, benevolence and liberal treatment.
Thirty years ago Bosnia was in the same condition that Macedonia is to-day, except that it was worse in the respect that it had a much larger proportion of Mohammedans and Turkish outlaws. The population were not fit for liberty, and if it had been granted them by the Berlin Conference, as they demanded, it would have been a curse instead of a blessing. A German writer, shortly before the Russo-Turkish war, described the situation in these words: “The misrule existing in the whole of the Turkish Empire is so great and so universal that it can be best characterized as a state of chronic and chaotic anarchy. One province, however, and that perhaps the least known of all, has in this respect a sad preëminence. It is a province where one can travel only with the greatest difficulty, and with not less danger than in the wilds of Kurdistan, where the intolerance and hate against the Christians is more living and active than around fanatical Damascus, and where the condition of the people is more abject and hopeless than that of any Fellaheen upon the Nile. That province is Bosnia.”