There remained only a race of peasants, without a history or traditions; a race over which five hundred years passed without altering or softening one feature or one barbarous custom. It was a race without a nobility or even a landed gentry; a race without a literature except a string of homicidal folk-songs which embody the spirit in which the Emperor Basil treated the conquered and captive Bulgars. The Russians found them and recognized them as fellow-Slavs—Slavs with much the same original habits and characteristics, but with none of the refining influences common even to the Russians of the reign of Ivan the Terrible. It was natural that Russia, with her hatred of Turkey, should sympathize with this race, near of kin, but suffering sorely from arrested development. Thenceforward Bulgaria had an abettor in her struggle against the domination of the Turk. The methods by which the Bulgarians resisted Turkish tyranny and rapacity were no better and no worse than their way of striving for a new Empire of the Orient five hundred years before. Their conspiracies, their incursions into non-Bulgarian territory, their skirmishes with the infidel at their gates, were simply a revival of the old eye-gouging methods of their mighty Czars of the Middle Age. But they had the knack of getting sympathy. In England, which followed Russia in her discovery of this race, reputedly extinct, there was no credit given to the thought that a Bulgarian could do anything wrong. When the London newspapers wrote of Bulgarian atrocities, they meant atrocities committed by Turks in Bulgaria. The Bulgarian reprisals were known only to the rare travellers who had penetrated into the heart of the Balkans, and who, after making close acquaintance with the habits of the natives, failed to discriminate between a throat-cutting executed by a Christian Slav and a similar bit of work by a heathen Turk. Very slowly indeed has recognition been forced of the fact that while the perpetrators of Bulgarian atrocities were hireling Turks of the lowest class, and not to be compared with the brave soldiers who compose the bulk of the Turkish Army, the Bulgarian comitadjis, with their cowardly cruelties, were fairly representative of the average Bulgarian soldier when at war. What more evidence is required than the telegram sent by King Constantine from the field of battle to his Prime Minister, instructing him to protest against the atrocities of the Bulgarian soldiery. It is dated July, 1913, and reads:—“Protest in my name to the representatives of the civilized Powers against these monsters in human form, and declare before the whole civilized world that I shall be compelled to take vengeance in order to inspire terror into these monsters, and to make them reflect before they commit any more such crimes.”