Macedonia, as any traveller could see, the time-honoured custom of
persecuting him who happened to be the under-dog was abandoned; the
authorities preferred to ignore the religious difference between
themselves and the Bulgarian party, and as the difference consisted in
praying for the Exarch instead of the Patriarch in the liturgy there was
not the slightest persecution needed to persuade the Exarchists to
become Patriarchists. Many who had been unaware of this new spirit which
informed Yugoslavia and had fled with the Bulgarian army, afterwards
came back to Macedonia. Nor did the Moslems complain: two Bosnian
Moslems were expressly included in the Cabinet, and every consideration
was shown to them--at Ghevgeli, for instance, where building material
was, after the War, so scarce that many of the inhabitants had nothing
but a hole in the ground, the prefect caused the two mosques which had
been destroyed by shell-fire to be reconstructed.
OBLIGATIONS IMPOSED ON THEM BECAUSE OF ROUMANIAN ANTISEMITISM
If the Serbs were to express their grievance against the Roumanian
ruling class for having landed them in this position, the Roumanians
would reply that the Serbs do not run the same risk as themselves of
being swamped by the undesirable Galician Jew. The Roumanians argue that
their peasants will go under if they are not shielded. "In our last
great manœuvres," said the late King Charles to M. de Laveleye,[45]
"it was proposed to entrust the supply of food to Christians. On the
first day the provisions came; on the second everything was late; on the
third day the whole army was dying of hunger. I was forced to make a
hasty appeal to the Jews. They have great qualities--they are
intelligent, energetic, economical; but these very qualities make them
dangerous to us on economic grounds." Roumanians acknowledge that the
agrarian policy of a few vast landowners and a submerged peasantry did
not admit of peasants being made more formidable by increased education,
and they doubt whether their country-folk, so fond of music and dancing
and drinking, have it in them to rival those Serbian non-commissioned
officers who, early in 1919, became millionaires by skilful operations
on the money market in the Banat. Yet the Serbs are as much addicted as
anyone to the aforementioned delights, and it is probable that the
Roumanian boyars do their own people an injustice. But while the people
were favoured at the expense of the immigrants--not always very
effectively: the Jews have been prohibited from owning land, yet a fifth
of the whole of Moldavia belongs indirectly to a single Jew--one would
suppose that some distinction might have been made between the more or
less pernicious alien who is apt to get the village into his toils and
that other Jew whose family has lived perhaps two hundred years in the
country, who feels himself a Roumanian but is legally a foreigner. One
Magder, a Jewish barrister, performed such exploits at the front during
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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