Excerpt from Macedonia: Its Races and Their Future The memory of this scene comes back to me when I ask myself whether I have succeeded in writing a fair book about the Macedonian question. My sympathies and my friendships are not all on one Side. The Turk in his shabby uniform, responsive only to primitive ideals of loyalty and honour, simple, courageous, dignified, and poor, is often a more attractive and picturesque object than the little huckster in European clothes who has called his cafe after Byron. But it is my weakness that I cannot hear the name of Freedom unmoved, even when it comes from the shrill throat of a Greek mother. All one's aesthetic impulses cry out on behalf of the Mohamedan with his easy, incompetent nature, his indifference to abstractions, his aloofness from the busy ugliness of the modern world. But there come crises in the development of Eastern affairs when one can no longer dally with these romantic preferences. The Macedonian insurrection of 1903 failed in its immediate object, but it created a tension which can only be relieved by the liberation of these miserable provinces. At such a moment it. Is irrelevant to remember that the Turks have their personal graces and their private virtues. We are concerned with them only as a governing race - a primitive Asiatic people with gaps in their minds and lacunaz in their vocabularies. The creed of the rulers is Islam obedience, resignation). Their subjects baptize their children Freedom. With all the tolerance in the world we can only say that such an arrangement is hopeless. If it were the subject race which believed in resignation and the victors in freedom, one might expect some measure of happiness. Reverse the position and the results can only be squalor, anarchy, and misery. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.