to introduce a new factor of discord and strife into the Balkan Problem. At the Congress of Berlin the Rumanian delegates who advocated the rights and interests of their country made no mention of Macedonia or the KutzoVlachs. But shortly afterwards the Bucharest Government was prevailed upon to espouse the views of the propaganda, and public subsidies began to reinforce private funds. In 1881 Rumanian colleges were established at Monastir and Yannina. By 1885 the number of Rumanian schools in Macedonia and Epirus rose to over thirty, and before 1900 to about three times that figure.

The movement had to reckon with two powers: the Ottoman Porte and the Ecumenical Patriarchate. The former, prompted partly by its traditional principle of dividing and ruling, and partly by Rumanian gold, at first welcomed a propaganda calculated to split the Hellenic forces in its European dominions. The rôle, however, which Rumania played in the Russo-Turkish war induced the Sultan to close the Rumanian schools. But owing to the subsequent quarrel with Greece over Thessaly, he reverted to the old policy. From that date the amount of sympathy bestowed by the Porte on the movement was strictly commensurate with the degree of hostility existing between Turkey and the Greeks, and after the GrecoTurkish war of 1897 the Sultan did his best to foster it.

The attitude of the Patriarchate was from the beginning undisguisedly hostile. The Patriarch of Constantinople, his title of 'Ecumenical' notwithstanding, is essentially an Ethnarch-the head of the Greek nation in the Ottoman Empire, and the champion of Hellenic nationalism. He could therefore hardly be expected to countenance a cause which, if successful, would have ended in a secession of so valuable a contingent from the ranks of Hellenism. This view was shared by the Greeks and the Hellenised Kutzo-Vlachs, as well as by the Government of Athens. All these forces strenuously opposed the Rumanian propaganda by means of a social, commercial, and sometimes ecclesiastical boycott. At one time, after the meeting between King Charles and King George at Abazzia, an understanding appeared imminent. But the truce soon came to an end, and in 1904 the dispute degenerated into a sanguinary struggle which lasted till the proclamation of the Turkish Constitution in 1908.

During those terrible five years Greek bands were engaged in a savage warfare with Rumanian bands, which found allies in the Bulgarian Komitadjis. The Government of Rumania retaliated by the suppression of the Greek schools in that kingdom, the expulsion of Greek residents, the denunciation of the commercial treaty with Greece, the imposition of disabilities on Hellenic subjects, and other penal measures. Passion ran so high on both sides that, but for the geographical situation of the two countries, the rupture of diplomatic relations would have been followed by a Greco-Rumanian war.

Thanks to this vigorous opposition which the Rumanian propaganda encountered from outside, and thanks also to its own inherent weakness and unreality, the progress it made was sadly disproportionate to its efforts and expenses. So much so, that several Rumanian patriots-like Prof. Urekia, senator and President of the Macedonian Committee, and M. Lazaresco Lecanta, Director of the Rumanian College of Yannina and Inspector of the Rumanian schools in Macedonia, both of whom had devoted many years to the cause-disillusioned and convinced of the hopelessness of their mission, frankly confessed its futility. M. Haret, himself, Minister of Public Instruction, did not hesitate to declare in the Chamber that the sums lavished on the mission had been

sheer waste of money. Consequently, the Rumanian Government in 1901 abolished the College of Yannina and other schools in Epirus and Macedonia, reducing the expenditure to a minimum of 12,000l.

That this step was amply justified is proved by the fact that, in 1903, the forty-nine Rumanian schools maintained in the vilayets of Salonica and Monastir could show only an attendance of 2000 scholars, while the total of Kutzo-Vlachs who, after forty years' preaching and bribing, had learnt to call to call themselves Rumanians amounted in the two vilayets named and in that of Yannina, to less than 14,000. So little headway had indeed been made that the Rumanian propaganda, in its appeals to the Kutzo-Vlachs to abandon the use of the Greek tongue, had to employ the language it denounced. In all those districts, and more especially in the vilayet of Monastir, I found the Kutzo-Vlachs as enthusiastic in favour of Hellenism and as bitter against their would-be

་

brethren as they had ever been. In the town of Monastir they formed nine-tenths of the Hellenic community, numbering among its members wealthy merchants and manufacturers, landed proprietors, and professional men with degrees of French and German universities. They pointed with pride to the flourishing Greek schools and hospitals, which they supported almost entirely out of their own pockets, and spoke with abhorrence of the few 'Rumanisers' as people who had sold their souls for silver.' The attitude of all classes of that community, as well as those of Nizopolis, Neveska and elsewhere, including the shepherds I found in their summer quarters on the mountains, was the same. 'We are Greeks. Never mind what language we speak at home. This patois is dying out. We deliberately accustom our children to talk Greek, and, thanks to the spread of education, the rising generation will speak nothing but Greek. . . . The fathers and the mothers of the future will know only Greek.'

The prudent policy inaugurated in 1901, however, was reversed in 1904, when the State subsidies were trebled, and both the Porte and the Patriarchate were requested to recognise the existence of an independent Rumanian community. The latter, as usual, flatly refused. The former hesitated till, in 1905, a diplomatic incident in which the Rumanian Consul at Yannina was the victim and the Turkish Governor the aggressor, afforded the Rumanian Government an opportunity for energetic action. The Sultan, anxious to avoid a rupture and pressed also by the Ambassadors of the Triple Alliance, yielded, and, as part of the satisfaction demanded, an Iradé was issued recognising the new 'millet' in Turkey. The real object of Rumania in expending so much money and effort on a manifestly unremunerative undertaking has always been something of a mystery. The distance of the trans-Danubian kingdom renders the annexation of the territories inhabited by the Kutzo-Vlachs impossible. The only tenable explanation is that Rumanian statesmen have been endeavouring to create an interest which they might, when the occasion offered, barter for acquisitions nearer home.

Had the Bulgars achieved the Big Bulgaria mapped out in the Treaty of San Stefano and torn up by the Treaty of Berlin, the bulk of the Kutzo-Vlach population

would have fallen under King Ferdinand's rule, and then Rumania would probably have demanded and got in exchange more than a rectification of frontiers. As it has turned out, she bases her demand in that direction on other grounds, and, as regards the Kutzo-Vlach districts in Macedonia and Epirus, which have been occupied by the Servian and Greek armies, she pursues a more devious path. Unable to enforce her claims to those remote territories, she is endeavouring to have them included in the Albanian State actually in the making. Similar attempts at a union between the Albanian and the KutzoVlach elements, not unlikely inspired from Vienna, were made in the past by the Rumanian propaganda; and it was a favourite doctrine of Apostol Margharitis himself that the Kutzo-Vlachs and the Albanians were brotherraces-the only legitimate descendants of the ancient 'Pelasgians,' and the rightful heirs of the lands which the Greeks and the Slavs had invaded as interlopers.

That serious Rumanian statesmen are actuated by puerile notions of this kind is inconceivable. It seems far more probable that in adopting this policy they deliberately serve the diplomacy of their friend Austria. The Austro-Hungarian Empire hopes to have in the Albanian State of the future a lever wherewith to move the Balkan Peninsula, and for that reason it wishes to secure for that State the largest possible extent of territory. Rumania herself would also like to exercise some influence over Albanian affairs, if not for her own profit directly, at least for the profit of Vienna, in return for some gain the exact form of which it is, of course, impossible to define, but easy to conjecture. There are many Rumanian districts under Austro-Hungarian domination, and notably the contiguous region of Bukovina, a portion of Moldavia, annexed by the Hapsburgs in 1775.

Be that as it may, I, personally, although strongly in favour of an Albania big enough to maintain itself in dignity and independence, cannot help considering the attempt to mix up that question with so palpable a chimera as the Rumanian pretensions to the Kutzo-Vlachs a step calculated to weaken rather than to strengthen an otherwise perfectly genuine and legitimate cause.

G. F. ABBOTT.

Art. 10.-THE PAST AND FUTURE OF RURAL ENGLAND.

1. The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields. By Gilbert Slater, D.Sc. London: Constable, 1907.

2. The Disappearance of the Small Landowner. By A. H. Johnson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909.

3. The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century. By R. H. Tawney. London: Longmans, 1912.

4. The Village Labourer. By J. L. and B. Hammond. London: Longmans, 1911.

5. English Farming; Past and Present. Prothero. London: Longmans, 1912.

By R. E. 6. Presidential Address to the Surveyors' Institution. By the Hon. E. G. Strutt. London, 1912.

7. A Pilgrimage of British Farming. By A. D. Hall, F.R.S. London: Times,' 1913.

8. Sugar Beet; Some Facts and Some Illusions. By Home Counties.' London: Cox, 1911.

AT the beginning of a 'land campaign' we may be thankful that the general public is better informed than it was in regard to rural problems, and that there are increasing indications of a wish that some of these problems should be removed from the field of party politics. So long as seventy-eight out of every hundred persons in England and Wales live in the towns, legislation for the benefit of the countryside will be devised with an eye to the approval of urban as well as of rural voters. It is important, therefore, that the efforts which have been made to bring home to the people of the towns the outstanding facts of rural life and industry should be persisted in. A few years ago students of the rural problem had to deplore the fact that, for a history of the land worker, it was necessary to go to a volume, a meritorious volume, by a professor in a Prussian university. The reproach has been removed by a series of contributions to agricultural history of more than ordinary substance. It is a pleasing circumstance, suggestive of the widening interest in the study of England outside the towns, that Mr Tawney's work should be dedicated to the Workers' Educational Association.