d of its population was foreordained to be a magnet
to the emancipated Christian nations of the Balkans. Of course the
expansion of Greeks and Slavs meant the expulsion of Turks. Hence
the Macedonian question was the quintessence of the Near Eastern
Question.

But apart altogether from the expansionist ambitions and the racial
sympathies of their kindred in Bulgaria, Servia, and Greece, the
population of Macedonia had the same right to emancipation from
Turkish domination and oppression as their brethren in these
neighboring states. The Moslems had forfeited their sovereign rights
in Europe by their unutterable incapacity to govern their Christian
subjects. Had the Treaty of Berlin sanctioned, instead of undoing,
the Treaty of San Stefano, the whole of Macedonia would have come
under Bulgarian sovereignty; and although Servia and especially
Greece would have protested against the Bulgarian absorption of
their Macedonian brethren (whom they had always hoped to bring under
their own jurisdiction when the Turk was expelled) the result would
certainly have been better for all the Christian inhabitants of
Macedonia as well as for the Mohammedans (who number 800,000 persons
or nearly one third of the entire population of Macedonia). As it
was these, people were all doomed to a continuation of Turkish
misgovernment, oppression, and slaughter. The Treaty of Berlin
indeed provided for reforms, but the Porte through diplomacy and
delay frustrated all the efforts of Europe to have them put into
effect. For fifteen years the people waited for the fulfilment of
the European promise of an amelioration of their condition, enduring
meanwhile the scandalous misgovernment of Abdul Hamid II. But after
1893 revolutionary societies became active. The Internal
Organization was a local body whose programme was "Macedonia for the
Macedonians." But both in Bulgaria and in Greece there were
organized societies which sent insurgent bands into Macedonia to
maintain and assert their respective national interests. This was
one of the causes of the war between Turkey and Greece in 1897, and
the reverses of the Greeks in that war inured to the advantage of
the Bulgarian propaganda in Macedonia. Servian bands soon after
began to appear on the scene. These hostile activities in Macedonia
naturally produced reprisals at the hands of the Turkish
authorities. In one district alone 100 villages were burned, over
8,000 houses destroyed, and 60,000 peasants