facts of history bring no real informing to the human mind
unless they can be traced to their causes, and thus a chain of events
followed link by link to see why some happening was so fruitful in
results, and to search for the relation of apparently isolated and
accidental incidents.

The Balkan Peninsula has to-day just emerged from a most bloody war. It
prepares for another to break out as soon as the exhaustion of the
moment has passed. Since ever the pages of history were inscribed it has
been vexed by savage wars. Why?

There is an explanation near at hand and clear. In the Balkans there is
a geographical area, which could house one nation comfortably, and is
occupied by the scraps of half a dozen nations.

(1) There are the remnants of the Turks who at one time threatened the
conquest of all Europe. Back from the walls of Vienna they have been
driven little by little until now they occupy the toe only of the Balkan
Peninsula. But the days have not far departed when they held almost all
the Peninsula, and the present smallness of their portion dates back
only from 1913.

(2) There are the Greeks, heirs of the traditions of Philip and
Alexander, and of the old Roman Empire. For centuries their national but
not their racial existence was dormant under the heel of the Turk. Greek
independence was restored recently, and since the war of 1912-1913 has
established itself vigorously.

(3) There are the Roumanians, descendants of the old Roman colony of
Trajan in Dacia.

(4) There are the Bulgars, originally a Tartar people coming from the
banks of the Volga, who entered Bulgaria in the seventh century as the
Normans entered England at a later date, and who mingled with a Slav
race they found there--at first as conquerors, afterwards becoming the
absorbed race.

(5) There are the Serbs, somewhat akin to the Bulgars, whose original
home seems to have been that of the Don Cossacks, who also came into the
Peninsula in the seventh century. They are of purer Slav blood than the
Bulgars.

(6) There are the Montenegrins, an off-shoot of the Serbs, who in the
fourteenth century, when the Servian Empire fell, took to the hills and
maintained their independence.

Those are the six main racial elements. But there are other scraps of
peoples--the Albanians, for example, and the Macedonians, and tribes of
Moslem Bulgars, and some Asiatic elements brought in by the Turks.

So far, then, the answer to the question, "Why are