Bulgaria, driving a thick wedge between Greece and Serbia, and thus giving
Bulgaria the undoubted hegemony of the peninsula, came into irreconcilable
conflict with those of its rivals. The importance of this point was
greatly emphasized by the existence of the Nish-Salonika railway, which is
Serbia's only direct outlet to the sea, and runs through Macedonia from
north to south, following the right or western bank of the river Vardar.
Should Bulgaria straddle that, Serbia would be economically at its mercy,
just as in the north it was already, to its bitter cost, at the mercy of
Austria-Hungary. Nevertheless, Bulgarian propaganda had been so effectual
that Serbia and Greece never expected they would eventually be able to
join hands so easily and successfully as they afterwards did.

The then unknown quantity of Albania was also a factor. This people,
though small in numbers, was formidable in character, and had never been
effectually subdued by the Turks. They would have been glad to have a
boundary contiguous with that of Bulgaria (with whom they had no quarrel)
as a support against their hereditary enemies, Serbs in the north and
Greeks in the south, who were more than inclined to encroach on their
territory. The population of Macedonia, being still under Turkish rule,
was uneducated and ignorant; needless to say it had no national
consciousness, though this was less true of the Greeks than of the Slavs.
It is the Slav population of Macedonia that has engendered so much heat
and caused so much blood to be spilt. The dispute as to whether it is
rather Serb or Bulgar has caused interminable and most bitter controversy.
The truth is that it _was_ neither the one nor the other, but that, the
ethnological and linguistic missionaries of Bulgaria having been first in
the field, a majority of the Macedonian Slavs had been so long and so
persistently told that they were Bulgars, that after a few years Bulgaria
could, with some truth, claim that this fact was so.