Bulgaria was first in the field and had a considerable start of the other two rivals.  The Bulgars claimed the whole of Macedonia, including Salonika and all the Aegean coast (except Chalcidice), Okhrida, and Monastir; Greece claimed all southern Macedonia, and Serbia parts of northern and central Macedonia known as Old Serbia.  The crux of the whole problem was, and is, that the claims of Serbia and Greece do not clash, while that of Bulgaria, driving a thick wedge between Greece and Serbia, and thus giving Bulgaria the undoubted hegemony of the peninsula, came into irreconcilable conflict with those of its rivals.  The importance of this point was greatly emphasized by the existence of the Nish-Salonika railway, which is Serbia’s only direct outlet to the sea, and runs through Macedonia from north to south, following the right or western bank of the river Vardar.  Should Bulgaria straddle that, Serbia would be economically at its mercy, just as in the north it was already, to its bitter cost, at the mercy of Austria-Hungary.  Nevertheless, Bulgarian propaganda had been so effectual that Serbia and Greece never expected they would eventually be able to join hands so easily and successfully as they afterwards did.

The then unknown quantity of Albania was also a factor.  This people, though small in numbers, was formidable in character, and had never been effectually subdued by the Turks.  They would have been glad to have a boundary contiguous with that of Bulgaria (with whom they had no quarrel) as a support against their hereditary enemies, Serbs in the north and Greeks in the south, who were more than inclined to encroach on their territory.  The population of Macedonia, being still under Turkish rule, was uneducated and ignorant; needless to say it had no national consciousness, though this was less true of the Greeks than of the Slavs.  It is the Slav population of Macedonia that has engendered so much heat and caused so much blood to be spilt.  The dispute as to whether it is rather Serb or Bulgar has caused interminable and most bitter controversy.  The truth is that it was neither the one nor the other, but that, the ethnological and linguistic missionaries of Bulgaria having been first in the field, a majority of the Macedonian Slavs had been so long and so persistently told that they were Bulgars, that after a few years Bulgaria could, with some truth, claim that this fact was so.

Macedonia had been successively under Greek, Bulgar, and Serb, before Turkish, rule, but the Macedonian Slavs had, under the last, been so cut off both from Bulgars and Serbs, that ethnologically and linguistically they did not develop the characteristics of either of these two races, which originally belonged to the same southern Slav stock, but remained a primitive neutral Slav type.  If the Serbs had been first in the field instead of the Bulgars, the Macedonian Slavs could just as easily have been made into Serbs, sufficiently plausibly to convince the most knowing expert.  The well-known recipe for making a Macedonian Slav village Bulgar is to add _-ov_ or _-ev_ (pronounced _-off, -yeff_) on to the names of all the male inhabitants, and to make it Serb it is only necessary to add further the syllable _-ich, -ov_ and _-ovich_ being respectively the equivalent in Bulgarian and Serbian of our termination _-son,_ e. g. Ivanov in Bulgarian, and Jovanovit in Serbian = Johnson.