Part 8 (1/2)
Tobacco culture is carried on chiefly in the south and in the provinces of Silistria and Kustendil. The area of the plantations is estimated at 3000 hectares. The province of Haskovo has the greatest yield; then follows Philippopolis, with 300,000 kilograms; Kustendil and Silistria, 210,000 kilograms. According to approximate calculations based on various statistics, three-fourths of the tobacco crop of Bulgaria is consumed by the inhabitants and only a quarter is exported.
The rose crop is next in importance after tobacco. The roses are used exclusively for the distilling of attar of roses. The rose gardens are limited to 148 parishes of the provinces of Philippopolis and Stara Zagora, and occupy a total area of 5094 hectares. The quant.i.ty and quality of the attar depend very much on the weather at the time of bloom and gathering. The roses most cultivated in Bulgaria are the red rose (_Rosa damascena_) and the white rose (_Rosa alba_). The best gardens are at Kazanlik, Karlovo, Klissoura, and Stara Zagora. The distilling of the attar is now a Government monopoly. The cultivation of beetroot has been introduced recently and is confined to the province of Sofia. The sugar refinery near Sofia utilises the whole crop for local consumption.
It is interesting to note in connection with Balkan agriculture that as far back as 1863 the much-abused Turk had actually adopted the very modern idea of an agricultural _Credit Foncier_ system in the Balkans!
In that year Midhat Pasha, Governor of the Danubian Vilayet, prepared a scheme for the creation of banks, to a.s.sist the rural population. The scheme having been approved by the Turkish Government, several of these banks were established. The peasants were allowed to repay in kind the loans which were advanced to them, the banks themselves selling the agricultural products. With the object of increasing the capital of the banks, a special tax was introduced obliging the farmers to hand every year to these inst.i.tutions part of their produce in kind.
When it was realised that these banks were of great service to the rural population, to which they advanced money at 12 per cent interest--instead of 30-100 per cent, as the usurers generally did--the Turkish Government extended the reform to the whole Turkish Empire, and obliged the peasants to create similar banks in all the district centres. According to their statutes one-third of the net profits of these banks was destined for works of public utility, such as bridges, roads, fountains, schools, etc., while the remaining two-thirds went to increase the capital of the banks.
During the Russo-Turkish war several of these banks lost their funds, the functionaries of the Turkish Government having carried away all the cash, as well as the securities and other property belonging to the banks' clients. After the war the debtors refused to pay, and only part of the property of the banks was restored, by means of the issue of new bonds. For that unfortunate end the war is rather to be blamed than the Turk. This _Credit Foncier_ system is pretty clear proof that the Turkish power was not always cruel and rapacious, since so sensible a reform was set on foot in one of the Christian provinces under the Sublime Porte.
Apart from the industries of the soil, Bulgaria has a small mining population and an increasing factory population. The Protective tariff is used freely to encourage young industries, and there is an effort just now to set up cotton-spinning as a national enterprise.
Serbia had a mixed pastoral and agricultural population up to the outbreak of the war of 1912, with pig-raising as the greatest of the national industries. By the Treaty of Bucharest she has, however, acquired much new territory, and is now probably predominantly an agricultural country. She has, too, great mineral resources at present, but they are little developed, and fine forests which only need an improvement of the means of communication to be commercially a big a.s.set. The Serbian is not so steadily devoted to his work as the Bulgarian: his is the pastoral as opposed to the agricultural character.
Nevertheless he has a reasonable faculty of industry. As is the case in Bulgaria the bulk of the land is held by peasant proprietors. These are organised into communes very much on the Russian system. It is an interesting fact that though in Serbia there is almost the same degree as in Bulgaria of seclusion of the women of the nation, a Serbian woman may be the head of the village commune, and, as such, exercise a very real authority.
Both in Bulgaria and Serbia the rights of the commune are very jealously safeguarded. The central government must take no part in the administration of the communes, or maintain any agents of its own to interfere with their affairs. The commune forms the basis of the State fabric and enjoys a complete autonomy. It is the smallest unit in the administrative organisation of the country. Every district is subdivided into communes, which are either urban or rural. The commune is a corporation. Every subject must belong to a commune and figure in its registers, the laws not tolerating the state of vagrancy. The members of the Commune Council are elected by universal suffrage, in the same way and subject to the same precautions as the members of the National a.s.sembly. In pa.s.sing it may be observed that theoretically the governments of the Balkan States are free democracies. Practically they are oligarchies tempered by a.s.sa.s.sination, which is still a favoured political weapon.
The Serbian has not much of the commercial faculty: and people of other nations manage very many of the businesses in Serbia.
The Montenegrin is willing to be a worker if it does not interfere with his manly amus.e.m.e.nts of warfare. His occupations are pastoral and agricultural pursuits and the chase. The Albanian is not content to be a worker at all under any conditions. His occupations are dancing and swaggering whilst his womenfolk carry on the bulk of the primitive pastoral and agricultural work.
It is not possible to hope for much industrial or commercial progress in Albania. But in Serbia and Bulgaria there are rich opportunities for enterprise and capital provided that an era of peace could be reckoned upon. It is the uncertainty on that point that will stand in the way of future Balkan development. When after the Treaty of London the Balkan League fell to pieces there was incurred, in addition to other sacrifices, a serious loss of confidence on the part of European capital.
CHAPTER X
THE FUTURE OF THE BALKANS
We have seen that a blood-mist has hung over the Balkans during all the centuries that history knows. Nature set up there lists for the great contests of races--on the path from the cold north of Europe to the warm south; on the path from Asia to Europe; and each great campaign left behind it shreds of devastated peoples. These shreds of peoples dwelling in the Balkans to-day have a blood-thirst as an inescapable heritage.
Turk, Bulgar, Serb, Roumanian, Greek--they may hold the peace for a time, and some may try to think that they are friends with others; but all have something of hate or fear or contempt for the others, and all prepare in peace for the next fight.
The Fates making the Balkan Peninsula the battle-ground of empires and races, the field of last stands, the refuge of residual fragments of peoples, imposed upon it its b.l.o.o.d.y tradition. Under other conditions, Serb or Bulgar or Greek or Turk or Roumanian left to themselves might have made happier history. For all these races can be human, reasonable, companionable. I have seen something of all of them in following a Balkan campaign as a war correspondent (not following always as the sheltered guest of an army, but forcing a solitary path through the peasant population), and in watching the wonderful acrobatic lying of a Balkan Peace Conference have seen thus the best and the worst of them. I have been an unofficial member of a Bulgarian court-martial; the guest of a dozen and more Bulgarian and Serbian army outposts, dependent often for food and shelter on the kindness of peasant soldiers; for days have held at the mercy of Balkan peasants my life and my property; have been mistaken for a wandering Turk twice, and have never suffered violence, rudeness, or the loss of a pennyworth. For the peasants, the commonfolk of all the Balkan peoples, I have come thus to a hearty liking; their priests and politicians (with a few exceptions), a different feeling.
Knowing that the ma.s.sacre is the national sport in many districts of the Balkans; that at the outbreak of the 1912 war the death-rate by violence actually decreased in some quarters because the killing was systematised a little and put under a sort of regulation; that always Turks and Exarchate Christians and Patriarchate Christians are plotting against one another new raids and murders, still I maintain that, if left to themselves, if freed from the prompting of priests and politicians the Balkan peasants of any race are quite decent folk. So I wish heartily that there was fair reason to hope for peace and happiness for them. Is there fair reason? To that question a study of the races and the personalities can give clues for an answer.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _Underwood & Underwood_
ALBANIAN TRIBESMEN]
The Bulgarian is dour, dull, a little greedy, honest, very industrious.
He is almost as much a Turk as a Slav. (I was told that during the Turkish occupation a Bulgarian mother finding herself with child after violence by a Turk brought up the child with her family, whilst a Serbian mother under the same circ.u.mstances killed the infant at birth.) The Bulgarian is very moral, marrying at an early age.
The Bulgarian peasant soldiers were very honest and loyal. At Mustapha Pasha one night, being short of food, I tried to get bread at the military bakery (all bread and flour having been requisitioned for the army). I offered a soldier up to five francs for a loaf without tempting him to sell it. Finally I had to get bread as a charity by declaring that I was actually in want of it for food. Later, travelling between Silivri and Chatalja, I encountered four Bulgarian foot soldiers who had become separated from their regiment and were starving. They asked for food and I gave them all I could spare, enough for two meals. One of the men produced a purse and took out some coppers wis.h.i.+ng to pay.
Travelling across Thrace (then in Bulgarian occupation), I often put up at some military post, being invited to become a member of the little mess--usually an official or two and four or five non-commissioned officers. Nearly always I had the same experience, that I was made free of the stewed goat and rice, or the dish of eggs and flour, or the bread and cheese of the Bulgarians, and when I wished to add from my stores chocolate and biscuits and dates, just a sc.r.a.p or two would be taken. I could see the men's eyes hungering for the delicacies, but nothing would induce them to take anything material from my stores.
The Bulgarian peasant soldier and officer I found, in short, to be a gentleman. Yet nationally Bulgaria is not ”a gentleman,” and has come to its present sorry state, I believe, largely on that account. The old Bulgarian aristocracy was exterminated by the Turks. The surviving Bulgarian peasantry has not yet been able to produce another aristocracy. It is the more cunning rather than the more worthy son of the peasant who wins to a sort of an education--often abroad--and becomes the lawyer, politician, official. In very many cases he carries with him into a higher stratum of society few of his peasant virtues and all of his peasant faults. He gets an overweening pride in his own acuteness. He becomes arrogant, ”too-clever-by-half,” and intrigue teaches him cruelty. I can contrast vividly two Bulgarian types in a noted diplomat, who fancied himself a Bismarck and had about the wits of an office boy, and an old peasant captain with whom I travelled from Kirk Kilisse to Chorlu. Generalising, the ”leading men” in Bulgaria are of a poor type (there are exceptions), the leading priests of a still poorer type; the people themselves are a sound people, and when the ambitious among them contrive to preserve their peasant virtues through the ordeal of education they will become a great people.
The Bulgarian did not seem to me naturally cruel. All the time that I was with the main army I saw no trace of outrage or cruelty. I did see several instances of curt and merciful justice.
I arrived one night at the Tchundra River alone, having gone forward from my ox cart because the miserable Macedonian driver and the still more miserable Bulgarian servant I had (I suspect he was in training for the diplomatic service) could not be induced to do a fair day's march. A vedette outpost of five men held the bridge. They took me--as I judged from their gestures rather than from their language, of which I understood only one word, ”Turc”--for a Turk. But they let me stay unmolested at their camp fire for an hour until an officer who spoke French appeared. I could give several similar instances. Never did I feel nervous in the least when making my way alone through the country in Bulgarian occupation (most of the time I was alone, for after a while I dropped my Macedonian and my Bulgarian servant).