Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/32

 Macedonian population as their own. Macedonians called themselves "Bougari," and spoke a Bulgarian dialect. But Serbian patriots, from the end of 1860, claimed Macedonia as an historical inheritance of the Tsar Dushan, and tried to prove that there were Serbian sounds preserved in Macedonian dialects. The feeling of the Macedonian Slav population was not with them. Macedonian Bulgarians participated in general Bulgarian risings of the seventies, and suffered equally when the Bulgarians were massacred by the Turks; and they were included by Russia in the liberated Bulgaria by the treaty of armistice of San Stefano (March, 1878). The "undivided" Bulgaria of San Stefano has always remained since then a national ideal. If Lord Beaconsfield had not likened at that time to the Austrian advice of Count Andrassy, and if this ideal had then been realised, there would have been no ulterior struggle between Serbia and Bulgaria, and no attempts on the part of Austria to make use of this struggle in order to divert the attention of Serbia from the Adriatic shore and from Dalmatia, which is Serbian, to the valley of the Vardar and to Salonica. The treaty of San Stefano, I am sorry to say, was torn to pieces at Berlin (July, 1878) by the help of English statesmen who suspected Russia of designs for expansion; but this suspicion afterwards proved quite unfounded. The "wrong horse" policy showed here at its worst. And thus it finally happened that the Bulgarian national ideal, based on ethnography, is at this moment being realised by Germans, and by that royal degenerate, their King Ferdinand.