k for which they are
imperfectly fitted. One must naturally make allowances for these small
countries which have been so sparsely furnished hitherto with men of
education that the Government considered it must mobilize them all.
Thus the professors found themselves enlisted in the service of the
State. Unluckily--to give examples would be painful--it too often
happened that the poor professor damaged irretrievably his reputation
and held up the State to ribald laughter. Those who belong to an old,
cultured nation are not always cognizant of the petty atmosphere, to
say nothing of the petty salaries, which is to-day the common lot of
Balkan professors. (A really eminent man, who, for twenty years has
been a professor, not merely a teacher, at Belgrade University
receives a very much smaller salary than that which the deputies have
voted for themselves.) Occasionally these professors must be moved by
feelings similar to those that were entertained by the Serbs of 1808,
who, having thrown off the Turkish yoke which they were resolved never
to bear again, "earnestly expressed, and more than once," according to
Count Romanzoff,[2] "their own will which induced them to beg the
Emperor Alexander to admit them to the number of his subjects." A
resolute old man, a Balkan savant of my acquaintance--he told me he
was a savant--said one day that before all else he was a patriot,
meaning by this that if in the course of his researches he came across
a fact which to his mind was injurious for the past, present or future
of his native land he would unhesitatingly sweep that fact into
oblivion, and he seemed to be amazed that I should doubt the morality
of such a procedure. Bristling with scorn, he refused to give me a
definition of the word "patriotism," and I am sure that, if he knows
his Thoreau, he does not for a moment believe that he is amongst those
who "love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with
the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot
in their heads." May the people of Serbia and Bulgaria rather listen
to such men as Nicholai Velimirovi['c], Bishop of [vZ]i[vc]a,[3]
who--to speak only of his sermons and lectures in our language--lives
in the memory of so many in Great Britain and the United States on
account of his wonderful eloquence, his sincerity, his profound
patriotism, and the calm heights from which he surveys the future. For
those who think with him, the Serbs, in unit