nd well-behaved citizens, invited them
to enter his land. They did so by hundreds of thousands.

The descendants of these people are to be found today throughout the
Balkan peninsula, though mainly in the large cities. They are so
numerous in Constantinople that four newspapers are published there in
the Spanish language, but printed in Hebrew characters. The city of
Salonika, a prosperous seaport of 140,000 people, which used to belong
to Turkey but now is part of Greece, has over 50,000 of these Jews.
They readily learn other tongues, and many of them can talk in four or
five languages besides their native Spanish, which they still use in
the family circle.

Constantinople (called Stamboul by the Turks) is a polyglot city, that
is, a place of many languages. Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Jews,
Italians are all found mingled together.

[Illustration: A Scene in Salonicka]

The main source of trouble in the Balkan peninsula is that the races
and nationalities are so jumbled together that it is almost impossible
to say which land should belong to which nation. Take the case of
Macedonia (the district just northwest of the Aegean Sea). It is
inhabited largely by Bulgarians, and yet there are so many Greeks and
Serbs mixed in with the former that at the close of the last Balkan
war in 1913, Greece and Serbia both claimed it as belonging to them
because of the "prevailing nationality of its inhabitants!" In other
words, the Serbians claimed that the inhabitants of Macedonia were
largely Serbs, the Greeks were positive that its people were largely
Greeks, while Bulgaria is very resentful today because the land was
not given to her, on the ground that almost all its inhabitants are
Bulgarians!

Religious and racial hatreds have had a great deal to do with making
the Balkan peninsula a hotbed of political trouble. Right in the
center of Bulgaria, for example, speaking the same language, dressing
exactly alike, doing business with each other on an equal footing, are
to be found the native Bulgarian and the descendant of the Turkish
conquerors; yet one goes to the Greek Orthodox Church to worship and
the other to the Mohammedan Mosque. With memories of hundreds of years
of wrong and oppression behind them, Bulgarians and Turks hate and
despise each other with a fierce intensity. Let us now leave the
Balkan states, with their seething pot of racial and religious hatred,
and turn to other causes of European wars.

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