THE MACEDONIAN REVOLT.

It was once my good fortune to obtain from the Vali of Salonica an explanation of the Macedonian problem which was as concise as it was true. "It is all the fault of the Bulgarian schools," he declared. "In these nests of vice the sons of the peasants are maintained for a number of years in idleness and luxury. Indeed, they actually sleep on beds. And then they go back to their villages. There are no beds in their fathers' cottages, and these young gentlemen are much too fine to sleep on the floor. They try the life for a little, and then they go off and join the revolutionary bands. What they want is a nice fat Government appointment." The Vali succeeded in condensing in these brief and characteristic sentences the main facts of the situation, and his summary had the merit of illustrating not merely the Bulgarian, but also the Turkish standpoint. The question of beds in one form or another is at the root of the Macedonian difficulty. The real motive of revolt, in other words, lies as much in the economic grievances of the peasantry as in the political aspirations of the educated class. In a land which ought to be one of the richest corners of Europe the villagers are sunk in a hopeless poverty--a poverty, moreover, which their rulers regard as their natural and predestined lot. On the other hand, there are the Bulgarian schools busily at work in every important centre and engaged in giving to thousands of teachable lads an education which would fit them for a modern and civilised society. They leave the school to plunge into the middle ages. There is no scope for their energy in the hovel without a bed. Official careers are closed to them, and in the long run, finding themselves unfitted for their environment, the only course which remains to them is to alter the environment itself. It is this stagnation, tempered by anarchy and varied by famine, which is the real fact behind Macedonian revolts. The massacres and atrocities on which Europe is apt to fix its attention are only the symptoms of a much graver and more chronic disorder. They are not the causes, but the consequences of revolution. One reads that three thousand peasants of Bulgarian race from the Adrianople region have fled in despair across the frontier into free Bulgaria, leaving their ripening corn behind them. They fled because the Turks had begun to torture them in order to find their hidden rifles. Or, again, it is the story of Smerdesh, a populous village which was surrounded, bombarded, and burned

to the ground, while a cordon of troops drove the desperate villagers back into the flames. The troops had come up before the place had completed its preparations for a siege. These are the horrors which find their way into the European Press. Nothing less startling obtains a hearing; and the revolutionary organisation aims at creating these object lessons. It knows that the sympathy of the civilised world can only be awakened by crude stimulants, and with a disregard of life almost worthy of some legitimate Governments, it sets to work to provoke the atrocities which alone impress the unimaginative ignorance of Europe. It is a different order of facts which really spurs the peasant to revolt. The men of the Adrianople region had secretly accumulated rifles for months before they were tortured; and the people of Smerdesh were already preparing defiance when they were attacked and massacred. It was the grinding poverty, the constant round of petty tyrannies, the unconscious co-operation of the tax-collector, the landlord, and the brigand which had driven them to despair. The startling and wholesale abominations are only incidents in the repression of a rising which has already begun. If we would understand the motives for that rising we must inquire a little into the daily circumstances of village life in Macedonia.

There is assuredly nothing in the approach to the average Macedonian village to suggest poverty or distress. It is a genial climate, and the soil will grow all that the peasant can use and much that he can export. Rice flourishes in the low-lying plains. Maize has found a second home in these regions, and wheat is everywhere abundant. Wine, tobacco, and opium yield a plentiful revenue; and to reach the village you must often pierce through a thick verdure of fruit trees. It is only when you hint that you would like to rest for a while under a roof that the revelation begins. The villagers, from an instinct of hospitality, will conduct you to the house of their wealthiest neighbour; but in truth the shades of difference are imperceptible to the eyes of a stranger. The houses themselves are rough structures of baked mud and rubble-stones. Windows are usually non-existent, and where they are to be found they are excessively small. The floor is of undulating earth; and for beds there are home-made mats of straw. A three-legged stool or two and a few pots of earthenware or tin are all the property that is visible. There may perhaps be a box which contains the home-made gala dresses of the women. One by one the family flocks in, and presently it dawns upon you that in the obscurity of this single room dwell, it may be, seventeen or eighteen persons-married couples of two generations, and young children of three or four

mothers. And then at length one realises the meaning of the Vali's remark about beds. Late and early, winter and summer, these seventeen peasants are out in the fields, planting their maize and tobacco with scrupulous fingers, driving the old ox behind the wooden plough on whose life hangs the hope of harvest, cutting wood on the mountain leagues away, or, it may be, tramping ten miles to market to sell six eggs for threepence and here are the fruits of their toil. The labour and the parsimony of generations, the joint work of brothers and sisters, the inheritance of a whole growing tribe of little ones— they are all represented by the mud hovel with the earthen pots, the wooden cradle, and the mats of straw.

What, then, becomes of all the stolid industry of the Macedonian peasant? Watch him from your train as it creeps through the country in the grey dawn, and as soon as you can see anything you will see him faring afield with his oxen and his plough. He takes no siesta at noon, and he labours till sundown. Much of his toil no doubt is unremunerative and he can seldom reach the best market. His plough is the wooden thing which Cain may have used in Eden, and the roads that should bring his produce to town serve also as channels for the winter cataracts. But for all that, he makes much wealth which he does not enjoy. His first complaint to you will be of the tax-collector. The fiscal system of Turkey begins with a heavy indirect tax of eight to eleven per cent. on all imports. It rakes in a little gain by monopolies of tobacco and matches. But it presses on the peasant chiefly by direct imposts which must be paid in cash. There are taxes on cattle, on sheep, and on fruit trees, tithes on every species of harvest, and a poll-tax to which only Christians are liable. In a certain typical village called Mavro (Caza Tetovo) some careful investigations made by one member of the consular corps in Uskub and checked independently by a colleague, went to show that the average peasant family could count, after satisfying landlord and tax-gatherer, on a net income of about £10. In direct taxes under all heads this village of 150 houses paid £T530, or about £3 10s. for each household. But it is only when one looks at the items of the account that one realises how oppressive the total was in fact. The Jew farmer who collected the tithe made almost twice the sum which he paid for his rights by auction. The process was simple. He had only to announce that he valued the hay harvest at 20 paras the oke and the trick was done. It mattered nothing that the market price of hay at the moment was only six paras. The Jew had the legal right to take the equivalent in cash of one-seventh of the hay harvest, and he had also the right to fix the scale by which its price should

be estimated. He had his gendarmes behind him. There is no redress, and the collection is usually made with every detail of stupid brutality. An impost which may be just tolerable in a good year is ruthlessly levied when the harvest is bad. It is a common incident for a village to cut down its fruit trees to avoid the tax upon them. Nominally there are fixed seasons when taxes become payable, but if the exchequer is empty these restrictions are soon forgotten. When I was in Monastir the army contractors had struck, and the municipality was obliged to find rations for the troops. Meantime the tax-collectors were doing their best to replenish the war chest. Taxes which are due in quarterly instalments were being gathered in advance. It was early summer and the peasant, whose corn-bin had long been empty, had exhausted his credit. I talked with the head man of one little village where the Jews and the gendarmes had suddenly swooped down to demand four quarters' dues in one lump sum. Eight peasants in this hamlet had nothing to pay, and asked for leave to go into the market to sell their lambs. Leave was refused, and the peasants were severely beaten. But, indeed, the statistics of the corvée are a proof in themselves of the oppressive incidence of the taxes. If a peasant is quite unable to pay his taxes, and if he has nothing which he can sell to meet them, he must join the gangs which are said to be repairing the roads— what they actually do I could never discover, for certainly the roads show little evidence of their labour. The peasant dreads a journey, he leaves his village reluctantly, and above all he trembles at the risks involved in this forced toil with the soldier and the gendarme at his elbow. None the less, I found that in the most prosperous village which I happened to come across (Coutchevishta), out of a male population of 560 no less than 370 men had been obliged last year to work off their obligations to the tax-collectors by joining the corvée.

Where the tax-collector reaps, the Albanian gleans. The gendarmerie, which itself is largely composed of brigands out of work, finds it prudent as a rule to make terms with any notable robber. A wise village will take the same course. For a certain sum paid annually, an Albanian chief will undertake to protect a tributary village, or if the village is outside the Albanian sphere of influence, it is generally obliged to have its own resident brigands, who may or may not be Albanians. If the village belongs to a Turkish landlord, these men are generally chosen from among his retainers. They are known under the name of bekchi, or rural guards. They are necessary because the Christian population is absolutely unarmed and defenceless. To a certain extent they guarantee the village against robbers from outside,

and in return they carry on a licensed and modified robbery of their own. They support the Turkish landowner against his Christian serfs; and in a mixed village they back the Moslem villagers in any roguery or violence which they may wish to practise on their Christian neighbours. There are of course honourable men among them, who retain the old Albanian traditions of loyalty and chivalry. But, in general, their conduct is what the conduct of armed men among an unarmed subject race will always be the Christian peasant is forbidden to own even a kitchen knife that is more than four or five inches long. The rural guard exacts a substantial ransom in cash for his services. He levies certain traditional dues, e.g., blackmail upon every maid who marries. The sum varies with the ability of her father and her husband to pay, and in default of payment, the bekchi will exercise the jus primae noctis. Indeed an experienced Consul in Monastir, an able man who has studied the country for many years, declares roundly that these men simply treat the women of the village as their harem. Beyond this they take what they desire in food or in services. In cash their exactions vary with their reputation for ferocity. It is quite easy to have precise information. The village of Mavro, for example, had seven of these parasites. They received from £7 to £20 apiece. In other words, the average household with its annual income of £10 paid away about £1 10s. to purchase the good will of these domestic marauders.

More grievous even than the exactions of the tax-collector and the vexations of the rural guard is the relation of abject dependence in which the peasant stands to his landlord. The system of land tenure varies a good deal in Macedonia. There are some fortunate and relatively prosperous villages where the peasants own their fields and dwell in a compact mass in a purely Christian village. At the other extreme there are villages where the men are mere day labourers. Occasionally the landlord is a Christian, but when he is a Greek speculator residing in town, I doubt whether he allows much sympathy or fellow-feeling to enter into his dealings with his Slavonic peasants. The majority of the villages of Macedonia belong to a Turkish bey, who works his field on a system of métayage, or profit-sharing. The land and the cottages belong to the bey, who supplies seed and sometimes provides salts and petroleum, besides allowing the peasants to cut wood. The peasant finds the labour, the plough, and the draught animals, and besides working on the fields which he "rents," he is liable to considerable demands in the shape of unpaid labour on the bey's private estate and in his mill, besides hewing wood for him and transporting his produce gratis to market. He pays