Excerpt from The Balkan Slavs in America and Abroad: An Address Delivered

I have been invited to speak on Balkan Slav life and culture, a subject on which information is not readily obtainable in books or other publications. It has also been suggested that I omit politics and history-an extremely difficult task. We are living in an age of print and communication, and no writer, speaker or student who believes that his observations and speculations are original, can be sure that the very thing he may say, has not previously been observed and said by others. Moreover, it is no less difficult to speak of the life and culture of races and nations, without alluding, at least, to their history and political life. Is not the character of a race or a nation the product of its history and the nature of its soil? And is not national char acter influenced by politics? Has the world at large any fair idea as to what extent Prussia was influenced by the political ideals and teachings of Treitschke, Fichte, Bismarck, or List? Or, to use a better illustration: compare English life and culture under Victoria, with English life and customs under Cromwell!

Balkan Slav life, social attitude, habits, folk-lore and music were and are, to' this day so interwoven with politics, that it is almost impossible to draw an accurate picture of these nations and races without touching upon their historical past and the political athm-osphere prevailing in those countries today. The rough and changeable climate of the Balkan mountains; and the prolific soil which, nevertheless, is tillable only with great effort, in some parts of those wonderful and wildly romantic regions, have been instrumental in rearing and nurturing of races as hard and tenacious as their rocky native hills. The Balkan Slavs have been for centuries the puppets of Turkish, Magyar and Russian intrigues; for centuries they have been oppressed by the Turk, and often decimated by merciless invaders. Yet it was their great cohesiveness and unyielding character which enabled them to withstand unspeakable cruelties and to escape extermination.

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