The reconstruction of South-Eastern Europe

THE RECONSTRUCTION OF

and Little Russians or Southern and Northern Italians. Owing to that it is really difficult to draw a fixed line of demarcation between them, unless it be a line on a political or other nonethnical basis. Thus the Slavs inhabiting Macedonia between Shara and the Rhodope mountains have in their language and customs the characteristic traits belonging to both Serbians and Bulgarians. Therefore it is a very bold assertion on the part of some writers on Macedonia, to pretend on a would-be scientific basis to describe the Macedonian population as purely Bulgarian or purely Serbian.

The misfortune of the present situation of the Balkan Slavs consists in the fact that the Turkish invasion of the fourteenth century came prematurely, before the natural process operating among them was wholly evolved in forming a strong national State, as was the case in France, England and Germany. The breaking up of the Turkish Empire in the nineteenth century found them, as to their mutual relations, in the state they were left in by the fourteenth century, when the natural political and national evolution in the Balkans was forcibly arrested. And when they awoke to the new life, the two great Empires of Russia and Austria-Hungary were already formed on the frontiers of the Balkans, and the Serbo-Bulgarian countries were virtually divided among them. Austria-Hungary (see the agreement between Emperor Joseph II and Empress

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