To the Editor of the Manchester Guardian.
Sir,—I thank you sincerely for the appreciative comments in your leading article of the 9th inst.
Such a nation does not exist, save in the manifestoes of the Macedonian Committee.
What does exist in Macedonia is a Slavonic population in the north, a mixture of Slavs and Greeks in the middle, pure Greeks in the south, and Mahometans sprinkled everywhere.
Moreover, the Slavs of Northern aud Central Macedonia are homogeneous neither in blood nor in sentiment. They are partly Bulgarian and partly Servian, but they themselves do not always know which is which.
In the days before 1885 it was Russians policy to call them all Bulgarians; after the breach between the Principality and the Empire it became Russia’s policy to call them all Servians.
Lastly, there is also a comparatively email proportion of Wallachs in the province, who however, are indissolubly hound up with the Greeks and for all political purposes are to be regarded as Greeks.
Now this holch-polch is labelled a “nation” by the apostles of the Bulgarian idea, who wish to absorb the rival races and, under the cover of the misleading name “Macedonian,- really to create a Bulgarian State destined sooner or later to join the Principality.
This is the long and the short of the Macedonian question as a purely political problem and apart from administrative misrule and all tho concomitant evils—separable from a land governed by the ” Unspeakable ” I neither defend nor denounce programmes, policies, solutions, and the rest of the nostrums which go to make up the bulky volume of Macedonian political pharmacopoeia.
I simply desire to establish historic truth, a thing which in these matters is exposed to at least as grave a peril as the “Macedonian nation” itself.
-I am, &c..
G. F. Abbott
Emmanuel College, Cambridge, January 12.
Manchester Guardian, 15 Jan. 1903 – A ‘Macedonian’ Nation does not exist
