In Bulgaria the Jew is a citizen in regular standing and can hold any office; Moslems are, and Protestants have been, members of the Sofia National Assembly; the representatives of the various religious bodies in Bulgaria (Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Moslem, Jewish) are all received on the same basis by Tsar Ferdinand. Bulgaria is the only Balkan country which has treated its Mohammedan population in such a way as to retain it, and today over half-a-million Moslems enjoy the benefits and protection of the Bulgarian government, while the Turk has fled from free Greece, Rumania, and Servia.

Bulgaria is not only a country where tolerance prevails; her truly representative electoral system places her in the vanguard of democracies. The Bulgarian voter is assured of representation in the National Assembly even if he does not choose to vote for the ticket of the strongest individual party. An electoral system, based on the principle of plurality, makes the relative predominance of a party at the polls absolute, since it delivers the total representation to the ticket receiving the largest number, but not necessarily the majority, of votes cast. This system virtually deprives the several individually weaker minorities of representation, depriving the country also of their direct contribution to its legislation. The number of Republican and Democratic representatives in Congress is not proportional to the number of Republican and Democratic voters in the land, to say nothing of the Progressives, while the million odd Socialists are without any representation in Congress at all. Bulgaria, whose political leaders have ever been inspired by America's democratic ideals, has now an electoral system which assures the proportional representation of minorities. The partisan complexion of the Bulgarian National Assembly represents with almost mathematical accuracy the actual political complexion of Bulgaria. Socialist, Agrarian, Radical, Democrat, Liberal, Nationalist-all have their representatives in the Sobranje, proportionate in number to their numerical strength. The Bulgarian citizen has no fear of "throwing away his vote," and therefore can vote as his political convictions urge him.

These are facts: any study at all careful of Balkan affairs will show beyond a doubt the superiority of Bulgaria's culture and Bulgaria's ideals to those of her neighbors. The Bulgarian is better educated, economically more solid, and more progressive than either the Serb, the Greek, or the Rumanian. He alone in the Balkans is truly democratic and tolerant. Can there be any doubt that Rumania's theft of the most prosperous corner of Bulgaria is a step backward from the point of view of human progress, and that the forced denationalizing of Bulgarian Macedonia by Servia and Greece is culturally a Balkan disaster? United with the Bulgarian kingdom, the Bulgars of Macedonia would have repeated during the next twenty years the record of their kinsmen sketched above. Under the oppression of Serb and Greek, their choice is either exile or supine acceptance of a régime of intolerence and exploitation. For this reason, the summer of 1913 is a black chapter in the history of Balkan civilization, no less than in the history of the Bulgarian struggle for unification.

Obviously, then, Bulgaria cannot regard it as the final chapter. The least penetrating student of Balkan affairs should realize the provisional, the impossible character of the present Balkan settlement. The Greek arm which is stretched eastward from Salonica in front of Bulgaria's face and body outrages geography, ethnography, economics. Will it be withdrawn or will it be severed? How will Servia fare, battling on the north with the tireless Austrian, and on the south pressed between the Bulgarian anvil and the Albanian hammer? Macedonian and Albanian revolutions bankrupted the Ottoman Empire; will the despots of Belgrade and Athens prove more successful than the Sublime Porte? Will Servia and Greece manage to assimilate the 1,000,000 Bulgars whom they have just devoured, to say nothing of the Albanian multitudes of Kossovo and Epirus? The Bulgar natives of Macedonia are proving a fairly indigestible lot.

These questions and thoughts dominate Bulgaria's mind today, while she is doing her best to attain her belated national unification without embroiling herself in the war

whirlpool in which her neighbor to the west is gasping. Bulgaria would regulate her conduct during the present conflict in accordance with the same conception of her rôle which sent her armies against the Turk two years ago the rôle of an ethnically homogeneous center of Balkan democracy. To that rôle Bulgaria is predestined by her geographic position and her racial and political record. Bulgaria must bring together her folk from Ochrid to the Danube, and from Dobrudja to the Aegean, and in the life of her national unity realize the democratic ideals which she has championed throughout her history as an independent state. When the Bulgarian body, which the Berlin Congress dismembered, is once more united and healed, Bulgaria will become one of those happy states which have no history of wars and diplomatic imbroglios.

For those who know the Bulgar well, know well that he is not a conqueror by choice. The Bulgar desires so ardently what is ethnically his own simply because he desires nothing further. He is too much of a realist to entertain any illusions as to the part that, in the nature of things, he can play in the world drama. In that respect he is indeed. a prosy rustic alongside of his neighbors, or perhaps he is better endowed with a sense of humor. For long years Rumania believed that her rapprochement with Austria had transformed the Triple Alliance into a Quadruple Alliance. The bards of Belgrade sang and sing to the tune of a dozen-millioned Serbo-Croat empire, in poetic scorn of the pertinent Viennese realities, disregarding as well the fact that the Croats of Agram speak of Belgrade as a pig-sty. And this very day, while Russ battles with Teuton for control in the Balkans, and while German submarines are challenging Britain's naval supremacy, in this war of Titans, the Nestors of Athens, without the semblance of a smile, are urging the "glorious sons of a glorious mother” to maintain the balance of power in the eastern Mediterranean with special respects, not only to Constantinople, but precisely to Rome!

The real Bulgaria (as distinguished from the Bulgaria of the newspaper correspondents) is strangely out of tune

in this Balkan concert of first violins. She does not aspire to play world-politics in the see-saw manner so much in fashion at Bucharest. Bulgaria is only anxious that the worldpolitics prospectors should leave her in peace; she was content for many years to manage her own affairs without even Russia's diplomatic representation at Sofia. Throughout her history she has shown a decided reluctance to join European coalitions, craving cultural commerce with all European nations as emphatically as she craved entangling alliances with none (whence the tragic circumstance that, after the disaster of 1913, the abundance of calumniated Bulgaria's friends outside of European chancellories was matched only by the total absence of such friends within those diplomatic enclosures). Nor does Bulgaria care to imitate Servia and conceive her rôle as that of a South Slavonic Piedmont. Nor is she afflicted with the megalomania and imperialitis of the neo-Byzantine hosts of King Constantine. Her aim is prosaic, simple in comparison with these; it is only this: to make political Bulgaria coextensive with ethnic Bulgaria, and thus express in the social life of all Bulgars those ideals which have made one-half the Bulgar land the home of material and cultural progress, tolerance, and democracy in the Balkans.

It is precisely this conception of her national ideals which keeps Bulgaria neutral today. In the European conflict as such, the Bulgar as Bulgar can take no side; for, if Russia's objective is Constantinople, the Austro-German road to the Aegean and beyond crosses Bulgar Macedonia. Bulgaria's disinclination to aid Servia, and the menace which the champions of Rumania irridenta find today in Bulgaria, are both explained by the fact that these self-professed liberators of oppressed kinsmen are themselves using Romanoff methods in regions ethnically Bulgar. Bulgaria has no territorial hunger nor a militaristic thirst; her wants are purely ethnic. An understanding of this first article in the Bulgarian program will make clear what to many may have seemed an inexplicable circumstance: Bulgaria's recent rapprochement with the Sublime Porte. This rapprochement is due merely to the fact that Bulgaria has now

THE JOURNAL OF RACE DEVELOPMENT, VOL. 5, No. 3, 1915

fewer ethnic quarrels with the Turk than with any other of her neighbors. The Drang nach Tchatalja, Bulgaria's solitary departure from the path she had always followed, has only confirmed her to that path. And today her military energy is not to be hired by anyone who promises to her profits at Turkey's expense; for while Turkey's loss may today be Bulgaria's gain, it cannot be Bulgaria's ethnic gain to any degree justifying the venture. Hence Bulgaria's firm intention to remain neutral, to wait for the moment when she can claim from the gods of war or peace what is ethnically hers and what alone she demands: the lands where prayers are still offered to the Bulgarian God. So long as the conflict is one of Ententes and Alliances, Bulgaria's every interest is to remain neutral, for she has no sons to waste in a world-politics quarrel. Neutrality is Bulgaria's unquestioned choice; although, to be sure, a prophet would be bold who undertook to forecast the course which any European state may have to follow before this war is over, especially a state like Bulgaria upon whom both coalitions are exercising all the pressure which solemn promises and solemn threats can bring to bear. Indeed such may be the course of this war that the very continuance of Bulgaria's neutrality may be sufficiently valuable to one or the other of the hostile groups to assure to her ethnic justice in the final settlement.

Bulgaria watches and waits for that day. They understand her ill who interpret her present stubborn neutrality as a mark of torpid indifference toward resolute action. The Bulgar is not hot-headed and quick-tempered; he can keep his head. A crisis such as Bulgaria survived in the summer of 1913 would have precipitated a revolution and a reign of terror in many European countries. The Bulgarian nation faced the tragedy with a stoicism which can not be understood, much less emulated, by a people who, like the Serbs, have managed to crowd into one short century four changes of dynasty, eight coups d'état, and at least four royal assassinations, and who have allowed only two of their ten rulers to die a natural death in office. The Bulgar grief is not despondency, nor is the Bulgar stolidity that of