What are the rights and wrongs in the case? Has the Peace Conference simply perpetuated a great injustice, repeated the mistake of the Congress of Berlin, deprived the Bulgarians of a province which is theirs by right of nationality and without which they can never rest? The Macedonian question has been before the world a sufficiently long time to have thoroughly wearied most people of it, perhaps, but not long enough to produce a clear understanding or any real unanimity of opinion about it. It presents, on the one hand, such a medley of jarring races, long-standing animosities, and ever-recurring atrocities, and, on the other hand, such a jumble of ethnographic riddles, philological controversies, psychological uncertainties, unreliable statistics, assertions and counter-assertions flatly contradictory on every point, that one almost despairs of an idea as to how it ought to be settled, or of the hope of ever seeing it settled at all. Macedonia contained in 1910--nobody knows what it contains now, after the last three wars--over two million people, including about 1,300,000 Slavs, 300,000 Greeks, and scattered minorities of Turks, Albanians, Vlachs, Jews, and Gypsies. The Greeks predominate in the south and southeast, and can make out a very good claim on ethnographic grounds to most of that part of Macedonia which they acquired in 1913. The dispute turns much more upon central and northern Macedonia, where the Slavs predominate, and upon the question whether these Slavs ought to be considered as mainly Bulgarians or Serbs. For the elucidation of this question, it is necessary to go very far afield. When the Southern Slavs first settled in the Balkans, they formed a great, undifferentiated mass, stretching from the Alps and the Adriatic to the Aegean and the Black Sea--a mass of ethnographic raw material out of which almost any number of ‘nations’ and ‘languages’ might have been developed in accordance with the accidents of history. As it turned out, two centres of political crystallization arose--a northeastern centre, in the region between the Balkan Mountains and the Danube, where a Turanian people called Bulgars organized the Slavs into a state to which they--the original Bulgars--contributed little except the name and the ruling class; and a northwestern centre of crystallization in Serbia and Montenegro. The modern Serb and the modern Bulgarian nations are closely akin in language and in blood, although the Bulgars have a certain Turanian strain in them, while the Serbs boast of being ‘pure Slavs.’ Sprung from substantially the same stock, the two nations have throughout their history vied with each other in trying to draw to themselves as large as possible a part of their kinsmen; and it is not surprising if the Macedonian Slavs, lying midway between the two centres of gravitation, have been attracted, now to the one and now to the other, without ever apparently taking on completely the imprint of either.