MACEDONIA.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THS "SPECTATOR."' SIR,—Might I be allowed a few lines with reference to the extremely interesting letter of your correspondent "X. X. X." in the Spectator of May 8th on the above subject P I think he is in his letter hardly just to the Slav element in the Balkan Peninsula. When he says that " of all the subject races the Greeks were the first to obtain their independence," and that she " extended her enlightening influence among
the Slays, who had not yet awakened to the consciousness of nationality," however true this last remark may be as applied to the Bulgarians, he has surely forgotten that the Serbs took part in the war ended in 1809 between Russia and Turkey, and that under Milosch Obreno- vitch she obtained virtual independence in 1815, some years before the independence of Greece, and that without requiring any Great Powers to fight a Navarino, and solely by her stub- born determination,—a fact which was unfavourably noted in Russia.
In speaking, again, of the previous insignificance of the Servian element in Macedonia, he seems to forget that many who are vulgarly accounted Bulgarians, are in reality Serbs who have been more or less Bulgarised, chiefly by Russian means, within the last half-century ; for Serbs and Bulgars easily amalgamate, as evidenced in the contrary sense by the Servianising of the Timok Valley; hence the recent Servian protest against the projected appointment of Bulgarian Bishops for Monastir and Dilsa, districts which in the Times' atlas are shown as Servian. Your correspondent, too, seems in the main to identify Russian with South Slavonic ambition, but the South Slays proper—i.e., the Servo-Croatian stock—have ever been intensely jealous of Russia, and were extremely irritated at their betrayal by that Power—not for the first time—in the Treaty of San Stefano. Servia would be at least as good a counter- poise as Greece, and it is in the realisation of her aims that we can best remove Russian influence. She looks to Russia because Russia alone promises her anything, and " half a loaf is better than no bread." Servia has been as independent in attitude as Greece, as the complaint of a leading Conservative paper that, "she has been in turn languidly philo-Austrian and tentatively pro-Russian," shows. And the above remarks would apply equally to the Bulgarians were not Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (and Orleans) their ruler.—I am, Sir, Ac.,
A. H. E. T.
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