If the Exarchist leaders had gone about their business with more
prudence--but how could one expect political sagacity among a people
which had not only been for centuries under the shadow of the Horses'
Tails, but which at the time when the Turk appeared was no whit his
superior in civilization? Very possibly the Balkan Slavs would in
those five hundred years have turned in disgust from Vlad the Impaler
and other exponents of Byzantine culture, if it had not been for the
Turk, who ignored his raia's potential moral progress and did not
think of regulating his natural cruelty. If the Exarchist leaders had
been born different, then Macedonia might easily have become--as now,
one hopes, it will at last become--a Yugoslav bond of union, instead
of an apple of discord. "I used to be a Bulgar and now I am a
Serb,"[54] said a man with whom I was walking one day in Monastir,
"and so long as I have work," he said, "I shall be perfectly
contented." How many Macedonians ought to echo his words! At Resan I
stayed at the house of an old gentleman called Lapchevi['c] and in
Sofia I had previously met his brother, whose name was Lapchev and who
was Minister of War. Until 1868 there was at Resan only a Greek
school, so that the elder brother's education left him merely a
Macedonian Slav, who could have become with equal facility a Serb or a
Bulgar; the younger brother had the advantage of a Bulgarian school,
but the disadvantage of having his Slav nationality narrowed down into
that of Bulgaria. These two brothers should set an example, renounce
the name of Serb and Bulgar, and call themselves simply Yugoslav. At
Resan the Serbian authorities are certainly trying to smooth away
these wretched divisions. No longer, as in 1890, does the little town
support half a dozen schoolmasters who are nothing if not Serb or
Bulgarian. Now the Serbs of Resan have retained not only the priests
who were in office during the Bulgarian occupation, but the male and
female Bulgarian teachers. In the winter of 1869 Ljuben Karaveloff
started his paper, the _Svoboda_, which was in opposition to those
Bulgars who dreamed of their country being freed by Russia and placed
under a Russian protectorate. Karaveloff's hopes were centred on an
independent revolutionary movement, and the Bulgars, he urged, could
best achieve their political, as distinct from their ecclesiastical,
freedom by associating themselves with the other Balkan peoples and
especially with the Serbs. "What is required," he said, "of the Balkan
Christians is union and union and union."