BALKAN BALLOONS
The Balkan Peninsula. By Ferdinand Schevill. 8vo. 559 pages. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $4.
A LONG felt want has been met at last, met at its timeliest, and with a completeness that is satisfying. "This book," Dr Schevill says at the outset, "plans not to formulate the Balkan problems theoretically, but to exhibit them in their historical development." There are three thousand years to consider in setting forth that development, during the last third of which, Balkania has been setting revolutionary pots on the fire, pots which presently boiled over and were found to be too heavy to be lifted off by any one, or any three countries.
Tracing the course of empires through the stormy peninsula, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman, Dr Schevill has found himself obliged to deal with every great European struggle that has ever taken place. To begin fairly late, there were the Crusades, the strife Venice and Genoa hung on a holy pretext in the fifteenth century, the wars of Sultan Ahmed against Poland and Austria in the seventeenth, the resultant feud with Catherine of Russia in the eighteenth—Catherine who resented other than her own oppression of her "doormat to Europe." Then came the Napoleonic wars when Egypt was wrested from Balkan control, and, for climax, the World War which toppled over on Europe when a Serbian killed an Austrian archduke. The Balkans have been playing with matches all their lives, and yet doing it between spells of lethargy in which they have betrayed only a heavy-lidded indifference to their flaming consequences. They seem not so much warlike as provocative of war, and the explanation of them as world factors constitutes one of the most intricate problems of Dr Schevill's treatise.
It is a scholarly work, brilliantly written. It gives plenty of space to the examination of causes, as well as to the pageantry of events themselves, and to a study of the involved mental make-up of the composites evolved by imperfect fusion with many conquerors. The Balkan states still "live side by side in disunion" as the emperor Maurice said of them more than a thousand years ago. Dr Schevill
