ewildering spectacle; but if we study the main
clusters of lines we shall see that the people whose movements they
chronicle have frequently preserved, in a remarkable fashion, certain
common characteristics: thus a stream flowed from the south-west towards
Valjevo in Serbia, and it is interesting to notice how the prominent men
of that region, whose ancestors came from somewhere between Montenegro
and the old frontiers of Serbia, have all of them certain
characteristics--a talent for foreign languages, a subtlety of
reasoning, originality but insufficient observation, and clever but
fallacious minds. Similarly in the Bulgar there are qualities which even
now can be ascribed to the Mongol blood. The Bulgar is more stolid than
the Serb; he is less given to sympathy and on that account can be cruel.
The Bulgar is benevolent because he is urged by kindliness, whereas the
more impressionable Serb is under the influence both of sentiment,
sentimentality and sympathy. These differences of temperament--and there
are others, more or less distinguishable--do not seem to Balkan thinkers
any reason why the two should keep apart. And a couple of months after
the Great War, during which the Bulgars, as their best friends must
acknowledge, were far from irreproachable in occupied Serbia--partly
this was due to the vast number of new posts for which they had no
suitable men--a few months afterwards a Bulgarian engineer was placidly
working among the Serbs at [vC]a[vc]ak railway station, wearing his own
uniform. And a Serbian butcher who emigrated to Bulgaria settled down at
Ferdinand just before the War and has lived there unmolested up to this
day, and that in spite of his not being very highly esteemed--for, as
the police president told me, he had married a woman with more wealth
than good fame; the president had been among her lovers.... One would
not suppose that the contrasting public morality of the two countries
will keep them apart. It is easy enough for us to argue that this
morality is on a pretty low level, because a Bulgarian War Minister saw
fit to sue, under a _nom de guerre_, a French armament firm which
omitted to send him the stipulated commission; because another Minister,
incarcerated on account of felony, could be liberated by the grace of
Tzar Ferdinand and become Premier; because a Serbian Minister used to
buy himself corner-houses, while his Bulgarian colleagues seem to own
most of the houses in Sofia. There was a