These assurances coincided too closely with Bulgarian aspirations not to be accepted without questioning. I do not say that the Bulgarians were not most heartily desirous to be freed of Turkish rule. Nor do I assert that if they had been offered the alternative between continuing subject to Islam and becoming a province of the Russian Empire, they would not have accepted the latter arrangement.

What I do assert is, that they would have accepted it reluctantly and without any kind of enthusiasm. Then as now, the one dominant instinct of the Bulgarians was the desire for independence, the wish to be once more a free people, ruling themselves after their own fashion. It is not easily intelligible to foreigners why the Bulgarians, under such endless vicissitudes and so many centuries of servitude, should have preserved so intense a sentiment of distinct nationality.

But be the explanation what it may, the fact that they did entertain this sentiment is beyond dispute. If the Bulgarians had been told beforehand that the price of their liberation was to be absorption into Russia, I think it possible, if not probable, they would have been more than half disposed to wait until their deliverance from the hands of the " unspeakable Turk " could be effected without the surrender of the national independence.

Russians and Bulgarians

Thus, when the Turks had finally been driven out of the country, there was a not unreasonable disappointment on the side of both Russians and Bulgarians. The former were disappointed because the people they had liberated displayed the utmost reluctance in accepting the protection of their liberators; the latter were disappointed because their allies, after having accomplished their emancipation, did not leave them in possession of the independence for whose sake emancipation had been mainly desired. It was the old fable over again of the man, the horse, and the stag, with the sole difference that not only did the horse complain because the man refused to dismount after the stag was killed, but that the man considered the horse ungrateful for even wishing to be relieved of his burden.

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