sh to have a controlling voice in the destinies of
Bulgaria and in those of the whole peninsula was natural, and it was just
as natural that Bulgaria should resent its pretensions. The eventual
result of this, however, was that Bulgaria inevitably entered the sphere
of Austrian and ultimately of German influence or rather calculation, a
contingency probably not foreseen by its statesmen at the time, and whose
full meaning, even if it had, would not have been grasped by them.

The Bulgarians, whatever the origin and the ingredients of their
nationality, are by language a purely Slavonic people; their ancestors
were the pioneers of Slavonic civilization as expressed in its monuments
of theological literature. Nevertheless, they have never been enthusiastic
Pan-Slavists, any more than the Dutch have ever been ardent Pan-Germans;
it is as unreasonable to expect such a thing of the one people as it is of
the other. The Bulgarians indeed think themselves superior to the Slavs by
reason of the warlike and glorious traditions of the Tartar tribe that
gave them their name and infused the Asiatic element into their race, thus
endowing them with greater stability, energy, and consistency than is
possessed by purely Slav peoples. These latter, on the other hand, and
notably the Serbians, for the same reason affect contempt for the mixture
of blood and for what they consider the Mongol characteristics of the
Bulgarians. What is certain is that between Bulgarians and Germans
(including German Austrians and Magyars) there has never existed that
elemental, ineradicable, and insurmountable antipathy which exists between
German (and Magyar) and Slav wherever the two races are contiguous, from
the Baltic to the Adriatic; nothing is more remarkable than the way in
which the Bulgarian people has been flattered, studied, and courted in
Austria-Hungary and Germany, during the last decade, to the detriment of
the purely Slav Serb race with whom it is always compared. The reason is
that with the growth of the Serb national movement, from 1903 onwards,
Austria-Hungary and Germany felt an instinctive and perfectly
well-justified fear of the Serb race, and sought to neutralize the
possible effect of its growing power by any possible means.

It is not too much to say, in summing up, that Russian influence, which
had been growing stronger in Bulgaria up till 1877-8, has since been
steadily on the decline; Germany and Austria-Hungary, who reduced Bulg