Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/81

 former Carpatho-Balkanic community was troubled. It reappeared then for the moment when Turkey lost, in a desperate struggle with them all, the greatest part of its European possessions, but on the division of such alluring spoils the old enmities burned and blood was shed in encounters between Bulgars on the one side and Serbians and Greeks on the other. The Roumanian intervention and the allotment of certain districts in Southern Dobrudja being considered by the Bulgars to be an unforgiveable injury, sowed the seed for a fresh and still fiercer conflict which was to burst forth like flames from a hidden and—by some—unsuspected fire when the heir of Austria-Hungary was assassinated at Sarajevo and the world war provoked in the Balkans gave to the inimical nations yet another opportunity of testifying to their reciprocal hatred.

Notwithstanding all such disputed territories, the interests of growing production, the daily-increasing extension of political horizons, the care for the moral goods—more precious than a handful of Macedonian or Dobrudjan villages—demand and indicate to all right-thinking politicians in South Eastern Europe the imperative need of a joint understanding. Here lies a more glorious and important path to peace and liberty than that provided by the relegation of all these States to be mere tools in a Franco-Italian rivalry to which France brings a supremacy of culture while Italy presents all the glories of her commercial traditions of the Middle Ages.

It can be accomplished not only by recognising, if only as a provisional measure, the present borders of the States, but also by assuring all individuals the right to cultivate the national soul each claims for himself. An economic millenium could be created; despite differences of language, exchanges