66 
THE BALKANS AND ITS PEOPLES. 
By L. B. de BE A UMONT, D.Sc.,F.L.S. March 1th, 1916. 
It must be recognised that there is much in the Balkan 
problem to puzzle and mislead outsiders. The Balkan 
peoples live in their past to an extent which may well seem 
inexplicable to us. Imagine a land strewn with the wreckage 
of empires, inhabited by peoples who, for many centuries, 
have been in turn conquerors and conquered, masters and 
slaves. Then the Turk came, and darkness fell upon the 
land, and nations were blotted out of existence, so that the 
West forgot even their names. When at last the awakening 
came, those unhappy races could only think again in terms 
of what they had been ; they did not understand anything 
else — as has been often and well said, their only desire was 
to go on from the point at which they had left off. The 
world had changed much during their long sleep, but to them 
the only real things were the questions left unsolved for 
more than 400 years. And to-day they still deplore the 
fact that those problems, so intensely vital to them, remain 
vague and obscure and apparently of minor importance to 
us Westerns. 
Perhaps the most difficult problem of all lies in this singular 
fact that each of the present Balkan States represents only 
a part of the population which bears its name and shares 
its political aspirations. The Serbs cannot take a portion 
of territory without the Albanians or the Bulgarians at once 
feeling themselves robbed of some villages which in their 
eyes are Albanian or Bulgarian villages. The Bulgarians 
cannot occupy any part of Macedonia without the Serbs 
or the Greeks asserting that Serbian or Greek people are being 
unfairly compelled to become Bulgarians. Thus, each 
Balkan State regards itself as being but the nucleus of a 
nation whose legitimate citizens are to be found outside 
of its political frontiers. And this is true enough, for when 
those States were formed, with so much difficulty and so 
much bloodshed, out of the shattered fragments of the 
Turkish Empire, all sorts of considerations quite indepen- 
dent of sound ethnography preoccupied the Western Powers 
and influenced their decisions. Not without some reason 
do the Balkan peoples complain that Europe did not under- 
stand them. Uncertain frontiers were created, and these 
