Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/399

Rh Herzegovina, nor does the Austrian government fail to help the poor Montenegrin government to feed those fugitives who are crowding into the little principality. There, Christian and Mahometan sufferers from the war are alike hospitably received, in numbers which sorely tax the resources of the country, and Austria gives about twopence-halfpenny a head per day towards feeding them. In some villages there are three or four times as many refugees as inhabitants, and, as the country might itself be attacked at any moment, help is much needed to save human life. Large numbers of the refugees are without clothing in the bitter winter weather in the mountains, having come from warm sunny plains, and are compelled to crouch together on the bare rocks without shelter and without clothing or sufficient food. The committees formed in London and in Austria for helping in this strait hope to rouse as much sympathy in England for these sufferers, who have none to help, as for the far less pitiable victims of the floods in wealthy France. It may well be kept in mind, too, that, although Turkey is not able to pay her creditors their dividends in full, it has been the strain to collect taxes to pay the half of the coupons due in January that has produced perhaps greater misery throughout Turkey than ever was known. In Asia Minor, — whatever similar atrocities may have been committed in the European provinces, — where the agricultural and grazier population habitually pays sixty-two per cent. of profits in taxes, where droughts have killed off the flocks, and famine and pestilence halved the population, the taxes for these dividends have been gathered by taking from the people the food distributed by the relief-committees and by compelling them to shear their few remaining miserable sheep in the middle of winter. Those who are free from the grief of having helped, by means of the Turkish loan, to .prop up such a government as this, may also feel free to help the poor and needy driven by it from home and kindred in Herzegovina.

It is not, then, of the Slavs of Austria nor of the Slavs in Russia that there is question now, but of the Slav populations in Turkey who are in overwhelming majority Christian, belonging either to the Roman Catholic or to the Greek Church, the latter preponderating considerably.

And first as to those yet hidden from western Europe under the name of Turkey. They are the Herzegovinians, the Bosnians, the Bulgarians, the Albanians, and some Greeks. Roumania and Wallachia, though nominally under the suzerainty of the Porte, are so entirely distinct from the empire and from its struggling Christian populations that they may be left out of account.

The limits of Bulgaria and Albania, as now variously marked on the maps, by no means represent the confines of the districts inhabited by those populations, it having been the policy of the Turk to confuse national boundaries and destroy national associations and traditions as much as possible.

The Albanians, commonly called Arnaouts in Turkey, were hill-tribes more or less bound up with the Servs in the time of Servian prosperity, and of allied race, who came down from the mountains, after the fall of that power, to people the plains left desolate by fugitive Slavs. They were Roman Catholics, and the Turkish government was willing to grant to them — as to others of that Church — privileges in the exercise of their religion which seemed unimportant because comparatively few in number. Those who remained in the mountains retained their religion; but those who settled in the plains sought favour with the sultan and gained permission to domineer over other Christians by professing Mahometanism. Among the apostate chieftains was the father of Scanderbeg, who gave his son to be educated by the sultan. The son renounced the Mahometan faith and joined the standard of John Hunniades in Hungary and fought the Turks. After a long struggle at the head of Albanian warriors he succeeded in making himself independent; but his adherents were not strong enough to maintain the dignity of their religion or their nationality, and soon after his death no result of his efforts was left but a fame more widely spread than that of any other leader of the Christians in Turkey.

The descendants of so fickle and unprincipled a people, with the accumulated vices of an apostate race, are become a byword in the neighbouring countries. These are the inhabitants of the northern plains of Albania, and are to be numbered among the Christian populations only because they are near kinsfolk to the Roman Catholic tribes who live a very free and independent life in the mountains whither the Turkish authorities dare not follow them, and because there is a tendency among them to revert to the ancient faith sufficiently marked to make it an open question whether they would not