s
especially how criminal it was to make this separation. Balkan
philologists to-day will tell you--and even those who are in other
respects the most rabid Serbs or Bulgars--that there is really no such
thing as a Serbian and a Bulgarian language, but only groups of
Yugoslav dialects. And yet it pleased the Great Powers to prevent the
union of the two Balkan brothers. In that region with which we are
dealing the Berlin Congress attempted to draw, with very inadequate
maps, a frontier line along the watershed; and the Commissioners who
were sent to mark out this line, observing that many of the indicated
points did not coincide with the watershed, thought it would be
preferable to trace the frontier along the saddle, between the
tributaries of the Morava on one side and of the Struma and the river
of Trn on the other. As the region was, however, not uninhabited the
farmers were frequently cut off, as at Topli Dol and Preseka, from the
meadows and the forests which they had regarded always as their own.
Bismarck, speaking with indifference of "the fragments of nations that
inhabit the Balkan Peninsula," could see in the national yearning of
the Yugoslavs only a yearning for lawlessness and tumult. So he
laboured at his plan of dominating Europe with the mighty structure of
the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian conservative empires; and if
he built it over a stream of democracy, with results that are to-day
apparent, who knows whether the statesmen of our day are not somewhere
constructing a house which to our descendants will appear equally
ridiculous? And anyhow, as we shall see, he was far from being the
only offender at the Berlin Congress. If that particular strip of
frontier had been drawn in the most unimpeachable fashion it would
still have been iniquitous.

One may object that even if the people were divided by rough-and-ready
methods, that was no reason why they should oppose each other, and
indeed a number of frontier incidents which occurred between the time
of the Congress and 1885 were not regarded, either by Serbs or by
Bulgars, as being serious obstacles to a union. But Russia and
Austria, revelling in the intrigues, continued to pull the two States
now this way and now that, and all too frequently against each other.
It can thus not be a matter of surprise if the rather inexperienced
statesmen of those little countries fell into line with the two Great
Powers and spent a good deal of their energies in