all in their power to prevent the obliteration of racial, linguistic,
and religious differences.' They have perpetuated and preserved, as if
in a museum, the strange medley that was existing when these lands
were first conquered by Turkish Sultans nearly five hundred years ago.
Their idea of government has always been simply to take tribute and
secure their paramount supremacy. The result has been that the
confusion, intermixture, and rivalry of race and religion is far more
intricate than even in the Austro-Hungarian empire, where the central
government has tried to reconcile and amalgamate. In Turkey, Odysseus
tells us, 'not only is there a medley of races, but the races inhabit,
not different districts, but the same district. Of three villages
within ten miles of one another, one will be Turkish, one Greek, one
Bulgarian--or perhaps one Albanian, one Bulgarian, and one Servian,
each with their own language, dress, and religion, and eight races and
languages may be found in one large town.'

What has been the upshot and consequence of this Turkish system? It
has been to make the Balkan Peninsula a battlefield, during the last
four centuries, of two great militant creeds, Christianity and Islam,
collecting the population into two religious camps; while inside these
two main religious divisions there are manifold subdivisions of race.
Men of the same creed are in different groups of race; nor are the
race-groups always of the same creed, for one section may have become
fanatic Mohammedans, while the rest have adhered to Christianity. The
intermixture is the more complicated because one cannot attempt to
distinguish a race by physical characteristics, by their personal
appearance or features as marking descent from one stock. The
practices of polygamy, slavery, of the purchase of women, and their
capture in the interminable wars, have produced incessant crossing of
breeds. It is not often understood or remembered that in former times
a tribe or band of foreign invaders, when they had to cross the sea or
to make long expeditions, very rarely brought women with them. So when
they settled on the conquered lands they must have intermarried,
forcibly or otherwise, with the subject race. If they massacred the
men, the women were part of their booty. Neither is the test of
language a sure one, though it is the best we have, and is becoming
more and more the criterion of race; for a kind of struggle for
existence goes on among