Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/76



But in all these countries the peasant is the backbone of the nation, the most active and the most efficient element of the State, the least prone to sudden changes and revolutionary madness. And in none of these countries, except perhaps for a short period in very recent Bulgarian politics, has a party of peasants for the peasantry been formed as have other parties to represent the various classes of society. The peasant organisation of the deceased Stamboliiski was only a weapon in the hands of a talented but monstrously ambitious pedagogue. The « greens » did not represent the traditional, the peculiar standard of life in the villages; their hatred directed against everything belonging to the cities was unnatural and foredoomed to disaster. After the failure of government and the death of the chief, no such organisation of the village remained to assure them of a return to power. This violent interlude in the life of Bulgaria was merely an intermezzo of personal tyranny flattering the interests of a class which had no reason to complain of the role it had played in the social and political organism.

In the peninsula all parties, of all nations, were merely of modern form, and not also a modernised, form of the old clan life as in mediaeval Scotland — or as in the England of Warwick the King-maker. It was most visible in Albania in the days of Essad, the chief of a clan, as it is in these days of the present King, the bey of another. The adherents come to the fortified house, to the koula (viz: tower) of their leader as to their own house and can demand to be housed and entertained. The success of the chief is a guarantee of rich rewards for his followers: all are ruined by his misfortune. In Greece, in Serbia, in Bulgaria the names are taken from the western parties in constitutional countries, but their significance