294 
number, ruling over an empire of Slavs, 
Greeks, Italians, Jews, Armenians, AI- 
banians, Kurds, Egyptians, Moors and 
Arabs, it demanded eternal vigilance to 
keep them all in a state of union and 
progress. 
These people have had constantly be- 
fore them the choice of revolt, conversion, 
assimilation, banishment and massacre. 
And at one time or another, some of each 
race have chosen each one of these, often 
two or three of them at once. Mean- 
while, following the wicked lead of Bis- 
marck and Disraeli, Europe has kept the 
Turk alive, because from financiers in 
each nation, the Ottoman Sultan has 
borrowed considerable sums of money. 
If the “Sick Man of Europe” should 
die, his debts might be left unpaid; 
worse than that, they might be unse- 
cured. And so the Balkans were kept 
in confusion and the rest of the Otto- 
man Empire as well, in the hands of 
wild soldiers. Besides there were still 
wilder hordes of local andartes, comitijt, 
ruffians, camp-followers, or  bashi- 
bazouks, always ready for murder and 
plunder. Whenever a period of peace 
and tolerance set in, as was sometimes 
the case, it was due to sheer inanition 
on the part of the Turk and as such it 
was followed by a fierce relapse. 
one the Balkan different 
fashion escaped from Turkish rule. 
First Greece and Serbia, Rumania and 
Bulgaria; then Rumelia, to become part 
of Bulgaria; Bosnia and Herzegovina 
to be absorbed by Austria, and in the 
war of 1912, Macedonia with Thessaly 
and Thrace, to be unequally divided 
their and finally 
Albania to be segregated as an impos- 
sible kingdom under an impossible king. 
Macedonia lies along the southern 
slopes of the Balkan Peninsula. It is a 
fertile region crossed by chains of 
One by 
states, in 
among neighbors, 
rounded mountains, with green valleys 
THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 
and swift streams, in physical conditions 
not unlike the south of France. It has 
45,000 square miles of territory, is 
about as large as the state of Maine, 
with a population nearly two-thirds 
that of the city of New York, and 
before the war of liberation it had 
about 2,250,000 people. The majority 
of these were Bulgarian in blood and 
they were allowed to have their own 
churches and schools. Some _ called 
Pomaks had adopted the Moslem re- 
ligion, others were Greeks in language 
as well as in religion. These were in the 
west (Castoria) adjoining the land called 
Thessaly. But Greek or Bulgarian, 
they were nearly all of the same blood 
originally, for the modern Greek is not 
the son of the incomparable Hellenes, 
but is described as a “Byzantinized 
Slav.” The suicidal wars of Athens 
and Sparta, with the greater and lesser 
struggles which history describes, ex- 
terminated the choice blood of Hellas 
and when the Greeks were gone, with 
them went “the glory that was Greece.” 
Turks, Jews, Armenians, Rumanians 
(Valaques) and gypsies made up the 
population of Macedonia. The Jews 
in Saloniki were refugees from Spain, 
still speaking a dialect of Castilian. In 
the face of “democratic famine working 
day and night,” fully half of these have 
now found their way to New York. 
As to the campaigns which have 
desolated Macedonia in the last few 
years we need say only a word. The 
history of the two Balkan wars is given 
with accuracy and justice in the monu- 
mental report of the Balkan Commis- 
sion of the Carnegie Endowment, a 
document of especial value in any study 
of the conditions preceding the “third 
Balkan war” which to-day has set the 
world in flames. 
The first Balkan war was altruistic as 
far as any war can be. Its purpose was 
