Forming my opinions

It has been my object, in forming my opinions as to the present condition of Bulgaria, to keep an open mind. I have tried to explain the general causes which have brought about the peculiar social and economical conditions of Bulgaria. I have endeavoured to do justice to the peculiar qualities of race and character which are partly the cause, partly the effect, of her present system of government, and her existing social organization. I have also tried to indicate the defects inseparable from the state of things under which alone a peasant community is a possibility.

Physical and intellectual

Anybody acquainted with peasant life, as it exists in naked reality not in fiction, can fill in for himself the various failings, social, physical, and intellectual, to which I have had cause to allude frequently. But I have made no attempt to strike a balance between the advantages and disadvantages of such a social fabric as the one I have sought to describe. In Bulgaria, as elsewhere, my rule has been to take things very much as I find them, to describe these things as they are in fact, not as they ought to be in theory ; and to leave it to others to decide whether the things so described are in harmony with the abstract principles which govern, or are supposed to govern, the condition of humanity.

Those who wish to find arguments or illustration, whether for or against the “ three acres and a cow ” school of political economy, may probably find both in what I have written. For my part, I have no theory to advocate one way or the other. I shall be content if I succeed in calling attention to a very exceptional social organization, which in all human likelihood must be transitory; and I know of no better term under which to describe this organization than the title I have chosen for this book, that of “ The Peasant State.”

For Englishmen in particular, quite apart from their general interest in the Eastern Question, this aspect of Bulgaria possesses a special importance. Public attention in England has in our days been greatly attracted to the advantages of a peasant proprietary. The merits or demerits of such a system lie for the present beyond the range of party politics.

Liberals and Conservatives are alike agreed to accept, as an axiom of political economy, the dictum that, in a well-regulated state, the mass of the community ought by rights to have a personal, individual stake in the land. Our public men seem to be coming round to the belief that the ideal State would be one best described by the saying attributed to Henry IV. of France, that he hoped to see the day when every French peasant would have a fowl in his pot We have endeavoured, by legislation, to create a class of small peasant land-owners in Ireland; we are contemplating the possibility of creating such a class in England. It needs no great political foresight to prophesy that “the three acres and a cow” theory, originated by Mr. Chamberlain, will soon become the recognized stock-in-trade of every political party which stands in need of the agricultural vote. Again, an important and increasing section of the Liberal party at home has taken up the view that large accumulations of private fortune are an evil to be discouraged, if not prevented, by legislation ; and that, in the new era which it is hoped to inaugurate, capital and pauperism will be alike comparatively unknown quantities.

I am not an ardent political economist I am not, perhaps, much of a believer in any scheme for the reorganization of society on a new and a better basis. But my personal views as to the progress of humanity are of no great interest to myself, and of none at all to the world at large. I shall not, therefore, obtrude any views I may hold on this subject in these pages. My endeavour is confined to a wish to show that Bulgaria, as at present constituted, approaches as closely as is consistent with the imperfection of all human institutions to the ideal State of our latter- day social reformers, in which there are to be no poor and no rich, in which every citizen is to have a share, and to a considerable extent an equal share, in the land of the commonwealth, in which there are to be no privileged classes and no social distinctions, and in which the people, who in the case of Bulgaria are the peasants, are to govern themselves by themselves and for themselves.