The Black Sheep of the Balkans. By Leland Buxton. (Nisbet.
4s. 6d. net.)—It is the habit of Englishmen to sympathize with the weaker side and the defeated party, irrespective of the rights and wrongs of the case. The interest excited by Dr. Crippen when he had been safely landed in gaol was an example of the racial instinct., there perhaps shown in excess. We are in no way surprised, therefore, to find Mr. Buxton entering a plea for the Bulgars, who of all our enemies had the least excuse to offer for declaring war and who showed quite as much barbarity as their German paymasters. Mr. Buxton urges alternatively that the Bulger black sheep are grey, or that, if they are black, they are no blacker than their neighbours. He detests the Greeks, and goes so far as to suggest that Salonika should be taken from them and given to the Serbs, by way of adding fuel to the flame of racial illwill in the Balkans. When Mr. Buxton says that the Bulger is little known here he is misinformed. No Balkan people had such persistent advertising agents here before the war as the Bulgars, and none enjoyed greater sympathy from 1877 onwards. Bulgaria's entry into the war
seemed to most of us, and still seems, to show the• grommet Ingratitude on her part, and the conduct of her troops and officials in Serbia and Western Thrace, as well as to our prisoners, was abominable. We shall continue to think that in the Peace Treaty which Mr. Buxton denounces Bulgaria escaped very lightly. Colonel Aubrey Herbert contributes an Introduction on the same lines as the author's.
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