In the Balkans

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Sep 30, 1913

FromThe Signs of the Times, Vol. 40, No. 38

The Literary Digest of September 6 says: “The Turkish and Greek papers, both adversaries of Bulgaria, have at length come out with a defense of the Turkish occupation of Adrianople. That Turkey is justified in snatching the city from Bulgaria is maintained on several grounds.” Summarized, these are as follows:

(1) It helps to preserve the balance of power in the Balkans, giving the Turk a right position as a ruling race with the other four Balkan States; (2) The city and province of Adrianople are inhabited by Mussulmans, not by Slavs. (3) If Turkey were to evacuate Adrianople, the whole Moslem world would rise up in revolution.

The keeping of the Treaty of London is counted absurd. We are told that “the powers should recollect that treaty breaking is ‘the badge of all their tribe.’” A prominent Turkish paper appeals to the people of the Adrianople region, and declares that Turkey is willing to abide their decision as to whether she shall rule or not. It declares that Bulgaria would not get five per cent of the vote. This same journal, the Sabah, warns the Christian peoples: “There is peril in the awakening of the Moslem world,” if roused by injustice to fury, “the Moslem subjects of England, Italy, and France, and Moslem friends of Germany become exasperated into revolution and armed resistance.”

It is directly charged, according to the Literary Digest of September 15, that Germany is secretly supporting Turkey, and one German paper, the editor of which, Prof. Schiemann, is near to the kaiser, declares that European opinion is in favor of the Moslems’ holding Adrianople, and even in a wise way pushing beyond the Maritza River into Thrace. Even the London Spectator admits that “it is pretty clear that the continued occupation of Adrianople will not in itself lead to armed coercion by Russia,” if the Turk does not push farther.

Later: A despatch from Constantinople, of September 15, says:

“It is officially announced that an agreement on the principal points of the frontier question was reached to-day by the Turkish and Bulgarian peace delegates.

“By the new treaty Bulgaria will lose the greater part of Thrace, guaranteed her by the Treaty of London. Turkey will take Adrianople, and, it is believed, will have Kirk-Kilisseh, east of the Maritza River, and a considerable tract west of that river.”

The world is becoming more and more divided over the new dances that have taken a large number of the people by storm, and there have been some very severe and just criticisms. Others contend that they are in reality the “unconscious expression of suppressed religious emotion;” and in a way that is true, if you go back to nature religion, and the worship of nature. Francis Toye, writing in the English Review, declares that the characteristics of ragtime are absolutely identical with those of the hymns formerly “sung by the Negroes in the white heat of religious fervor during some protracted church or camp-meeting,” in which the whole person is yielded to bodily emotions. He calls it hysteria—“a particular semi-religious hysteria, nearer to madness than any other.” He goes on to say that he had personally taken the trouble to learn the effects of the ragtime, and sought some of his more intelligent and disreputable friends who frequent the haunts where nothing but ragtime is played, and all except one, he says, “are emphatically of the opinion that since the introduction of ragtime, people are much more given both to excitement and drink.” It has about the same effect as the drinking of intoxicants. The Paris Petite Journal declares that the origin of the “tango” is in what is called the “frog quarter” of Buenos Aires, and in this section “brothels, dance halls, and drinking resorts are constructed of flattened oil cans and preserved meat tins. The quarter is devoted to the lowest forms of vice, and the ‘tango’ is only the dance development of the cautious, tiger-like, pliant, and treacherous steps of the disreputable frequenters of the barrio.” George Gibb Turner, of McClure’s, carries the “turkey trot” back to the old Negro dances. He calls it “a curious recrudescence” originating from the same source as the gambling game “craps,” and found its main origin in the crude and heathen sexual customs of Middle Africa, afterward passing through the centers of prostitutes in large cities, where the contributions of city savages from Paris to San Francisco have been added to it. It is easy and exciting, and therefore thousands of people who never learned the older dances have picked this up. In fact, there seems to be a regular mania which has obsessed thousands with these low, immoral dances. Never before, says Mr. Turner, has dancing been such a provocation to immorality.