Gone for ever are the days of the Turkish censor when Danov, who sold
at Veles and Salonica the schoolbooks which at first he wrote himself,
was obliged to leave the name of Pushkin out of an anthology because
of its resemblance to pushka, a gun. And, with their more civilized
methods towards each other, we may be sure that the days have gone
when a Serb at Kumanovo could compel Moslem children, before uttering
the above-mentioned slogan, to cross themselves; while no Serbian
bishop will find himself confronted with such a problem as that which
in 1913 nonplussed the Bishop of Skoplje--certain Moslems had been,
against their will, converted by the Bulgars to Christianity and they
now requested the Bishop to undo what had been done. These days of
religious intolerance are as distant as those mediaeval ones in Bohemia
when Roman Catholic nobles, many of them foreigners, succeeded after
the Battle of the White Mountain to the estates of the decapitated
Protestants and conducted themselves after the fashion of one Huerta,
an ennobled tailor of Spanish origin, who drove the peasants of his
district to Mass with the help of savage dogs.... In view of the
strides which have been made in so short a time we shall have in
Macedonia an example for the other Yugoslav lands. No longer then will
anyone complain like that old couple at Ni[vs] who, on the arrival of
the Bulgarian army in the winter of 1915-1916, announced that they
were Bulgars. "But what can you do with our daughter?" they asked,
"for she says resolutely that she is a Serb, since she has been to
the Serbian school." Both the Serbian and the Bulgarian people have,
in the last twenty or thirty years, been through the severest school.
Now, after an appropriate interval--some authorities say five and some
say a hundred years--they will be fellow-citizens in Yugoslavia. The
last serious conflict between them, which we will consider in the next
chapter, has been waged.