property, and the murder of priests, became features of the propaganda. In the zeal to bring about the preponderance of this or that race the armed ruffians murdered women and children, and all the barbarities which aroused the indignation of Europe when Turkish irregulars were the guilty, were now committed against each other by the Christian protégés of our humanitarians. With fire and sword the several propaganda were spread through the country. The Greeks boycotted the Bulgarians in the towns, and by various methods of persecution endeavoured to drive Bulgarians from coveted districts on the sea coast. The Greek bishops and clergy worked with fanatical activity; not only did they forbid their co-religionists to give employment to Bulgarians, but they were largely responsible for the atrocities committed by the Greek bands, and went so far as to draw up proscription lists of Bulgarian schismatics who had to be assassinated; but the Bulgarians often had their revenge, as when, about a year ago, they dragged a Greek clergyman out of his church and burnt him alive.

Out of the many stories which one could tell, here is one which will serve as an example of the methods of the bands. On November 26, 1907, a Greek band of over sixty men surrounded the village of Zelenitchi, while a party broke into the house of the Bulgarian, Stoyan Gateff, where

a marriage was being celebrated, killed thirteen men, women and children, and wounded others.

To add to all this orgie of bloodshed, robbery and violence, came the formation of bands of Mussulman Turks, endowed with the bravery of their race, who, while protecting the Turkish peasantry against the Christians, pillaged and burnt the villages of the latter, and did their share of the killing; while the bodies of half famished, unpaid Turkish troops who were sent to search for concealed arms over the countryside naturally lived on the wretched Christian peasants, and helped themselves to all they needed.

Between the Greeks and Bulgarians there was never a truce save in winter, when the snow lay deep upon the Balkans, but sometimes the Serb would join the Greek bands in their attacks on the Bulgarians. Thus organised brigandage terrorised the countryside, and the bands, when they ran short of money or supplies, did not hesitate to rob even the people of their own kin, whose cause they were espousing, levying blackmail upon them, and burning their villages if demands were not satisfied. It is not to be wondered at that a large proportion of the Christian population found the succour of their ferocious brethren somewhat irksome, and were ready to welcome the pacific programme of the Young Turks. It will be remembered that when Bulgaria declared her independence last year the

Bulgarian peasants in Macedonia held meetings at which they denounced the Principality and sent a memorial to Prince Ferdinand to warn him that they would hold him responsible for whatever evil might now befall them, as the result of his action.

Of all these Christian propagandists the Bulgarians aroused most sympathy in Europe; for they are a brave and straightforward people. They had good reason to hate the Greeks, who had always persecuted them. When, in 1903, the Bulgarian exarchists in Macedonia, with their hundreds of small armed bands, carried on a gallant but hopeless guerilla war against the Turkish regular troops, the Greek Macedonians remained neutral, but worked against their fellow-Christians after a fashion characteristically Hellenic; they assisted the Turks by betraying and denouncing to them the Bulgarian rebels ; for in their zeal to forward their ultimate political designs they were not ill pleased to witness the extermination by the Turks of their fellowChristians who repudiated the Patriarch and refused to become Hellenised. It was not until 1904 that Greek bands, led by officers of the Greek regular army, crossed the frontier into Macedonia to wage war not only against the propaganda of the Bulgarian exarchists, but also that of the Wallach inhabitants, who desired to throw off the tyrannical supremacy of the Greek Patriarch and have an Exarch of their own, as

the Bulgarians had, with their own schools and churches in which their national language could be used. The Sultan, who was ever playing one Christian sect off against another, and made no real effort to stop the fratricidal strife that served his designs, now gave his encouragement to the Wallach propaganda, for this did not threaten the integrity of his Empire as did the propaganda of the Greeks and Serbs, there being no question of annexation of any Wallach districts of Macedonia to the distant kingdom of the Wallachs' kin, Roumania.

The Bulgarians proved themselves the braver men in this racial struggle; but the Greek bands were the strongest in numbers and were also the best equipped, for they were always kept well supplied with ammunition and food by the rich merchants in Athens. The Greek bands chiefly distinguished themselves by attacking unprotected villages and slaughtering unarmed peasants; halfa-dozen brave Turkish gendarmes have on occasion sufficed to rout the largest of these bands. I need not say that the unfortunate Turkish peasants, being regarded as enemies by all parties, suffered severely at the hands of the propagandists.

The condition of the country ever got worse. In 1907 there were one hundred and thirty-three conflicts between Turkish troops and Greek and Bulgarian bands, and a large but unrecorded

number of fights between rival bands: Greek and Wallach; Greek and Bulgarian; Bulgarian and Serb; and Albanian and Serb. The bands used to come down to the plains and carry off the crops outside Salonica itself. The Greek Committee sent a manifesto to the villages round Salonika ordering the villagers, under pain of death, to become converts to Orthodoxy and to accept the Patriarch, and have themselves inscribed as Greeks upon the census papers. Shortly before the Sultan's proclamation of the Constitution the artillery of the Salonica garrison had to shell the reed-covered swamps in the vicinity of the city to drive out the bands that had found shelter there.

It was in the city of Salonica that the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress decided to establish the head-quarters of the secret society that was to prepare the outbreak of rebellion in Macedonia, a city which, as being the cradle of their liberties, has already come to be regarded as a sort of holy place by patriotic Turks. It is a city worthy to be the scene of the initiation of one of the world's great movements. The splendid seaport, on the acquisition of which Austria had set her heart, impresses every visitor with a sense of a peculiar nobility with which it is invested by its aspect, situation, and history. Stately and beautiful is the approach to it from the sea as one sails up the fifty-mile broad Gulf of Salonica; on