Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/31

 the story of the relations between the Balkan States is, in substance, the story of a continuous struggle between these two tendencies of union and discord.

The idea of a Balkan Union is not new. It was dreamed of by Slav idealists and intellectuals over half a century ago. It was even tried by the Serbian patriot. Prince Michael, who, as early as 1866–68, i.e. about the time of the unification of Italy and Germany, concluded the same system of treaties which forty-five years later brought about the victory of the Balkan peoples over the Turk. But for a time it did not succeed. In May, 1868, Michael fell victim to a conspiracy in which Austria had some hand, because Austria knew how dangerous it was for her to see, that union of the small Balkan nations accomplished. With Michael's death Serbia lost her chance of becoming what she sought to be, the "Piedmont" for all Balkan Slavs, because in the next years another Slav state in the Balkans was formed by Russia. This was Bulgaria, whose national consciousness was being awakened. Thenceforward there began a growing rivalry between the two related nations. Bulgaria had won (1870) her own national church, the Exarchy, while Serbia remained under the Greek Patriarch, and, as the Patriarch proclaimed the Bulgarians to be schismatics, there was the new difference of religion to increase the feeling of national disparity. It was then that the struggle for Macedonia began, and grew ever fiercer. Before that time, the Serbians did not claim the