t,
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 considerati