of the Black Sea, following the coast of the Aegean Sea some miles inland,

is preponderatingly inhabited by Slavs. These Slavs are the Bulgarians in

the east and centre, the Serbs and Croats (or Serbians and Croatians or

Serbo-Croats) in the west, and the Slovenes in the extreme north-west,

between Trieste and the Save; these nationalities compose the southern

branch of the Slavonic race. The other inhabitants of the Balkan peninsula

are, to the south of the Slavs, the Albanians in the west, the Greeks in

the centre and south, and the Turks in the south-east, and, to the north,

the Rumanians. All four of these nationalities are to be found in varying

quantities within the limits of the Slav territory roughly outlined above,

but greater numbers of them are outside it; on the other hand, there are a

considerable number of Serbs living north of the rivers Save and Danube,

in southern Hungary. Details of the ethnic distribution and boundaries

will of course be gone into more fully later; meanwhile attention may be

called to the significant fact that the name of Macedonia, the heart of

the Balkan peninsula, has been long used by the French gastronomers to

denote a dish, the principal characteristic of which is that its component

parts are mixed up into quite inextricable confusion.



Of the three Slavonic nationalities already mentioned, the two first, the

Bulgarians and the Serbo-Croats, occupy a much greater space,

geographically and historically, than the third. The Slovenes, barely one

and a half million in number, inhabiting the Austrian provinces of

Carinthia and Carniola, have never been able to form a political state,

though, with the growth of Trieste as a great port and the persistent

efforts of Germany to make her influence if not her flag supreme on the

shores of the Adriatic, this small people has from its geographical

position and from its anti-German (and anti-Italian) attitude achieved

considerable notoriety and some importance.



Of the Bulgars and Serbs it may be said that at the present moment the

former control the eastern, and the latter, in alliance with the Greeks,

the western half of the peninsula. It has always been the ambition of each

of these three nationalities to dominate the whole, an ambition which has

caused endless waste of blood and money and untold misery. If the question

were to be settled purely on ethnical considerations, Bulgaria would

acquire the greater part of the interior of Macedonia, the most numerous

of the dozen nationalities of which is Bulgarian in sentiment if not in

origin, and would thus undoubtedly attain the hegemony of the peninsula,

while the centre of gravity of the Serbian nation would, as is ethnically

just, move north-westwards. Political considerations, however, have until

now always been against this solution of the difficulty, and, even if it

solved in this sense, there would still remain the problem of the Greek

nationality, whose distribution along all the coasts of the Aegean, both

European and Asiatic, makes a delimitation of the Greek state on purely

ethnical lines virtually impossible. It is curious that the Slavs, though

masters of the interior of the peninsula and of parts of its eastern and

western coasts, have never made the shores of the Aegean (the White Sea,

as they call it) or the cities on them their own. The Adriatic is the only

sea on the shore of which any Slavonic race has ever made its home. In

view of this difficulty, namely, the interior of the peninsula being

Slavonic while the coastal fringe is Greek, and of the approximately equal

numerical strength of all three nations, it is almost inevitable that the

ultimate solution of the problem and delimitation of political boundaries

will have to be effected by means of territorial compromise. It can only

be hoped that this ultimate compromise will be agreed upon by the three

countries concerned, and will be more equitable than that which was forced

on them by Rumania in 1913 and laid down in the Treaty of Bucarest of that

year.



If no arrangement on a principle of give and take is made between them,

the road to the East, which from the point of view of the Germanic powers

lies through Serbia, will sooner or later inevitably be forced open, and

the independence, first of Serbia, Montenegro, and Albania, and later of

Bulgaria and Greece, will disappear, de facto if not in appearance, and

both materially and morally they will become the slaves of the central

empires. If the Balkan League could be reconstituted, Germany and Austria

would never reach Salonika or Constantinople.