ho believed that
strength lay rather in the union of thirty or forty people, under the
authority of the head of the house, than in a more dispersed society
which would encourage individual initiative--yet Serbia was still a
semi-Turkish and a quite despotic country, with all the civil service
largely filled by Serbs from Hungary and many of the higher offices in
the possession of the relatives of the Princess, for Alexander's wife,
a lady from the neighbourhood of Valjevo, was as celebrated for her
cleverness as for her beauty. It is regrettable that she did not
prefer to take in hand the women's legal status, which is still too
much like that of minors. When the princely pair had been expelled in
1858 and Milo[vs], to his infinite delight, called back from
Bucharest, his place of exile, there was yet a great deal for the
Omladina enthusiasts to do. Milo[vs] at the age of seventy-eight was
senile; he would sit for hours outside his old, white Turkish house at
[vC]a[vc]ak, while the passers-by knelt down to kiss his hand; in
church he would become oblivious to his surroundings and would
garrulously talk in a loud voice to friends around him.

THE SLAV VOICE IN MACEDONIA

Assuredly the Omladina Society had some knowledge of affairs in
Macedonia, for Dimitri Miladinoff, the elder of the two brothers, had
been at Karlovci, where he was offered the professorship of Greek at
the Serbian school. Miladinoff had been born at Struga in Macedonia
and educated at Jannina, where he noticed that a number of the names
of forests, rivers, villages and ruins sounded odd in Greek--they
seemed to have much more resemblance to the language spoken by the
Slavs who lived beyond his home, the Bulgars. This awoke a flame in
him. At Ochrida, where he was presently appointed as a teacher in the
school, he gave his lessons in the customary Greek, nor did he
undervalue the advantages the Macedonian Slavs could draw,
particularly at the stage they were in, from the study of Greek
literature and from the contemplation of the patriotic virtues of old
Greece. But at the same time he began to give his pupils a Bulgarian
translation of what they were learning; and one day in 1845 while he
was in the middle of a lesson, taught in that strange manner, on
Thucydides, the Russian archaeologist Grigorovi['c] appeared and in
amazement cried, "But we are brothers!" It was to him a marvel that
these people's mother-tongue was Slav. Miladinoff had a project