ian people in spite of a preliminary prejudice. And this
conversion of view was not the result of becoming involved in some
passionate political attitude regarding Balkan affairs. I am not now
prepared to take up the view of the fanatic Bulgar-worshippers who must
not only exalt the Bulgarian nation as a modern Chosen People, but must
represent Servian, Greek, and Turk as malignant and devilish in order to
throw up in the highest light their ideas of Bulgarian saintliness.

The Balkans are apt to have strange effects on the traveller. Perhaps it
is the blood-mist that hangs always over the Balkan plains and glens
which gets into the head and intoxicates one: perhaps it is the call to
the wild in us from the primitive human nature of the Balkan peoples.
Whatever the reason, it is a common thing for the unemotional English
traveller to go to the Balkans as a tourist and return as a passionate
enthusiast for some Balkan Peninsula nationality. He becomes, perhaps, a
pro-Turk, and thereafter will argue with fierceness that the Turk is the
only man who leads an idyllic life in Europe to-day, and that the way
to human regeneration is through a conversion to Turkishness. He fills
his house with Turkish visitors and writes letters to the papers
pointing out the savagery we show in the "Turk's Head" competition for
our cavalry-men at military tournaments. Or he may become a pro-Bulgar
with a taste for the company of highly flavoured Macedonian
revolutionary priests and a grisly habit of turning the conversation to
the subject of outrage and massacre. To become a pro-Servian is not a
common fashion, but pro-Albanians and pro-Montenegrins and
Philhellenists are common enough.

The word "crank," if it can be read in a kindly sense and stripped of
malice, covers all these folk. Exactly why the Balkans have such an
effect in making "cranks" I have already confessed an inability to
explain. The fact must stand as one of those things which we must
believe--if we read Parliamentary debates and newspaper
correspondence--but cannot comprehend.

But any "crank" view I disavow. Whether from a natural lack of a
generous sense of partisanship, or a journalistic training (which crabs
emotionalism: that acute observer of men, the late "General" Booth, said
once of his Salvation Army work, "You can never 'save' a journalist"), I
came back from the Balkans without a desire to join a society to exalt
any one of the little nationalities struggling