I shall not discuss the larger European aspects of the Macedonian question which produced the recent murder of King Alexander-aspects which may very well affect your lives some day as the murder at Sarajevo affected them twenty years ago-but I wish to talk to you about Macedonia and the Macedonians themselves, particularly those in the organization which planned and executed the assassination of King Alexander. I saw them and talked with them in their camp in 1929, and I have tried to keep in touch with them since then.

Perhaps the most important thing I can say is this: Although to you the death of King Alexander seems murder pure and simple; and though to you it seems merely a horrible and bloody crime which has left a little boy without a father and with a kingdom to govern, yet I should like you to remember that, horrible as this thing is, it is no more horrible than the things that King Alexander's gendarmes have been doing in Macedonia for the last ten years.

Macedonia is the country north, east, and west of Salonika. If you took a rope about a hundred miles long and swung a circle with Salonika as a pivot, you would roughly describe the country known as Macedonia. It is the same country that we find in the New Testament. It is the country from which one of its nationals appeared to the Apostle Paul in a vision and said to him, "Come over into Macedonia and help us." From that time to this, Macedonia has known no peace except perhaps during the Great War, when it was behind the German lines and the military police kept order. The Macedonians are closely akin to the Bulgarians. They speak a dialect which is comprehensible to any Bulgar. They have roughly the same civilization; and make no mistake, there is plenty of civilization in the Balkans.

SINCE THE PEACE TREATY

After the peace treaty, Macedonia was split up into three parts. The Greeks were given the seacoast, the Yugoslavs took almost all that was left, and the Bulgarians were given a small district about Petritch. The Macedonians immediately found that they had changed masters for the worse. They were denied the use of their own language; they were forbidden to worship in their own language; they were forbidden a press in their own language; they were forbidden the right of free and peaceable assemblage; and they were placed under the control of some eighty thousand Serbian gendarmes.

The final blow was a requirement which to the American always seems grotesque, which seems a little thing to fight about, but which was a bitter thing in the Balkans. The people were compelled to change their names from the Macedonian-Bulgarian "off" to the Serbian "ovitch." To an American, I suppose that seems amusing; and yet if you were compelled to worship in Serbian, and forbidden English language newspapers, and compelled to make your names end in "ovitch," I imagine that there would be a very considerable disturbance in Philadelphia. I know that if I were compelled to change my name to "Bakelessovitch," I should do something drastic about it. It is a small thing, but it means a great deal.

There is, of course, dispute as to what these people really are. The Serbians say that they are all without doubt Serbs. I went down into Macedonia some years ago to see whether the people were all Serbs. What I found was a gendarme on every platform, and a police control so strict that secret service men followed me everywhere I went and watched everything I did. When I reached my destination the gendarmes seized me and held me for fully thirty minutes while they grilled me. That seemed to me fair evidence that there was no special enthusiasm in that particular country for Serbian rule. Else why the police precautions? We do not need in Philadelphia an army of secret service men, we do not need eighty thousand gendarmes, and we do not need a policeman on the platform to keep you good Americans. That is because you want to be Americans. It would, I imagine, take a great many more gendarmes than that to turn you into Serbs; not that there is anything wrong with being a Serb, but you just don't want to be Serbs.

THE IMRO AND ITS METHODS

In the bad old Turkish days, the Macedonians, like all other Balkan peoples, intrigued for freedom. They set up an organization which is known as the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, and which is better known all over Europe as the IMRO, from its initial letters. The word "IMRO" is a name of terror-or a name of hope, according to which side one is on-from Salonika to Marseille. The IMRO claims to be the legitimate government of Macedonia, because it believes that it represents the Macedonian people.

If the IMRO really does represent the Macedonian people, it is very difficult for Americans to quarrel with its point of view. It is a revolutionary government. As Ivan Mihailoff, the leader, said to me five years ago when I talked to him in his mountain camp (and he said it rather proudly), "We are a government, but of course we are an illegal government. As a matter of fact, we are illegal everywhere." The IMRO maintains its own army, its own law courts, its own executioners (as you have seen), and its own secret service-and an extraordinarily efficient one it is, as I have good reason to know. It kept a man watching me for ten days, and he was, I think, the only secret service man I never caught. Of course I cannot be sure of that, because one usually does not know when one has failed to catch a secret service man.

The assassination of King Alexander is the successful consummation of a series of eight attempts since the spring of 1929. If you wish to call it assassination you may do so, but it is not assassination quite as we should understand it here. In the first place, the IMRO quite frankly is a terrorist organization. It proposes to operate by terror until it has made Macedonia too hot for any outsider to stay. However, it operates on what it believes to be the highest possible principles. No man, except in the greatest emergency, is assassinated until he has had a fair trial. To be sure, he is rarely at that trial. There have been cases when victims of the IMRO were present at their own trials, but they did not especially want to be there.

Furthermore, the IMRO does not ordinarily strike until the prospective victim has had a fair warning to change his ways. If he declines to accept that warning, he receives a second warning, and then, as the third step, comes the death sentence. The death sentence is the only sentence that the organization can carry out. A government which is always on the run can make itself felt only by striking a death blow. The milder punishments are beyond it. You may like that or you may not like it, you may applaud it or you may not applaud it; but if you are going to free the country, that is the only thing that you can do.

EXAMPLES OF IMRO TACTICS

Perhaps I might tell you of some other episodes of this same sort which the IMRO has carried out, and of which it is very proud. The last thing that Mr. Mihailoff said to me as I left his camp was, "Just one moment till I tell you about my wife's famous murder."

There was a Rumanian named Panitza who had incurred the enmity of the IMRO for various offenses. For eighteen years the organization had tried to kill him and had failed. He was a man of extraordinary resource and ingenuity. On one occasion the revolutionary organization trailed him to a house where he stayed that night. In the night they crept up to bomb the house, and blew it to bits. When the excitement had died down and the IMRO had gone, Panitza crept out of the haystack where he had thoughtfully spent the night, and went his way in perfect safety. Then Mme. Mihailoff was set upon his trail, and killed him.

There was the murder a couple of years ago of a friend of mine, Simeon Evtimoff, who was one of the most brilliant propagandists that the organization has ever had. He was the League of Nations man for the IMRO; he was the man who did all their propaganda in Europe; and in an unlucky hour he was called back to Bulgaria to carry on propaganda there. Like every member of the IMRO, he went in danger of his life at every move, and he therefore moved with a bodyguard. One day, as he crossed outside the Royal Palace in Sofia, men dressed as hunters opened fire on him from a park. Evtimoff was killed, but not until he had made a fight, and the men who killed him went to the hospital, very much the worse for wear.

The Bulgarian Government knew, of course, that the IMRO would exact vengeance for the killing of its man, and they used every precaution to prevent an assassination. They filled the hospital with police and secret service men, they guarded every door and every window. But what they did not know was that the nurse attending those men was an agent of the IMRO. Mihailoff sent her a pistol, and that Bulgarian girl went into the room of her patient, made him as comfortable as she was able, plumped his pillow, and then stood back and shot him. She is serving sentence of penal servitude now, yet she feels that she has done her duty, has done her bit for Macedonia.

Now, the Macedonian attitude is very difficult for Americans to understand; but you may well ask yourselves, "What else is there for these people to do?" Under the peace treaties, it is provided that all minorities in all countries, including the Balkan countries, are to have the right to the free exercise of their, own language, a free press, and opportunity to petition the League for redress of grievances. In all the time that this bloody struggle has been going on, every one of those rights has been denied to the Macedonian people. As a result, they have had recourse to the only possible means of action left to them. Political murder is a dreadful thing, it is an especially dreadful thing in American eyes; but it is very, very difficult to see what else they are to do except yield up their liberty, their rights, their country, and become Serbs.

SECURING AN INTERVIEW

I wish to describe exactly this organization, the country, and the conditions against which the Macedonians are in revolt. I went into the hills in 1929 in an attempt to see Mr. Mihailoff. It is very hard to interview a revolutionary chief. He has very good reasons for not wishing to see unidentified strangers, and he is always in danger of his life. I have no doubt that it took him some hours to make sure that I was not the latest thing in political assassins. No one had ever sent an American political assassin, and therefore to send one would have been very clever. However, I was not an assassin. In fact, I never have been a political assassin-at least not yet.

I spent ten days in Sofia, waiting, and every three days a man came to see me, always a different man. Then finally came a man who walked in, smiled, and said, "I think you are going on a little journey." And I, not being quite sure how much Chicago slang had penetrated to Bulgaria, said with some trepidation, "How long will this little journey last?" My Bulgarian friend smiled again and said, "Twenty-four hours, I think." I was glad to know that it was not for eternity. I said, "What do you want me to do?" He said, "I want you to stand outside the hotel at seven o'clock tomorrow morning, and something will happen."

At seven o'clock in the morning I stood outside my hotel, and a gentleman whose name I had better not mention, and which you would not understand anyhow, came around the corner and said, "Are you ready?" I said, "Yes." He said, "Come." We walked around behind the hotel, and three men got out of a big automobile. One was a gunman. Gunmen are international. This man might have come straight from Chicago. There was the same grim expression, the same stocky build, and the same bulge over the hip pocket. There was a chauffeur, and then (this is typical of the IMRO) lest the American might be bored upon this journey, lest he might find time hanging heavy on his hands, there was a German-speaking university man to entertain me on the way.

THE JOURNEY

We went perhaps twenty miles out, when suddenly the car jolted to a halt as two strangers hailed us. The gunman smiled slightly, got out, clapping a hand to his hip pocket, and went back. Our car had not stopped instantly, but had sped on for a good hundred yards, out of pistol range. There was a great deal of talk. Then the men were brought up and I said to my guide, "Who are these chaps?" He said, "Well, they are just friends, just friends taking a stroll." To this day I do not know who those men were, but I do not believe they were taking a constitutional in the mountains at ten o'clock in the morning.

We went on another fifteen miles and came to a halt suddenly by a little culvert where there was a carriage and another gunman and another guide, and my crew said, " Come on, get out." I got out, they shook hands warmly, and said, "Good-bye. This is where we leave you." They vanished and there I stood, alone in the middle of the Balkan Peninsula with three total strangers. We went on in our carriage, and although I did not know it then, I have since discovered that the man who was either protecting me or seeing that I behaved myself, according to the necessities of the case, was really something very special in gunmen. He had been detached from Mihailoff's own bodyguard to see first to my personal safety, and secondarily to my good behavior. I am glad to tell you that my behavior all that day was admirable.

I had supposed that we would go on into the mountains on horseback. When we reached a little farmhouse whose yard was closed in with apple trees so thick that one could not see through the foliage, my guide said, "Come on, get out. We will stretch our legs." I walked down one side of the farmyard and up the other. My gunman, taking my little brief case, said, "Let me carry your bag." I said, "Oh, don't trouble, it is just a little thing." He said, "Let-me-take- your-bag." And I said, "Extremely kind of you. Take it."

I thought I was waiting for horses to be ready, as I strolled along outside the farmyard, when suddenly a peasant ran out and there was a flood of Bulgarian that I could not follow. We were taken into the farmyard, and suddenly the bough of an apple tree was thrown aside and Mihailoff himself stepped out. He is famous for dramatic exits and entrances, and he is also famous for never giving an interview except where the Macedonian countryside is at its best.

This is the man that the European press dispatches would have you believe is a mere butcher. He is certainly one of the most ruthless men in Europe, but he is not a ruthless man except as his government bids him be.

CLOSELY GUARDED

I spent all day, talking. As I walked in to talk with Mihailoff, I glanced over my shoulder and my heart stopped at least three beats, because behind me stood eight or nine picked political assassins. They were the best men in the organization, chosen as Mihailoff's personal bodyguard. I have seen some good troops in my time, but I never saw finer fighting men than those fellows. Only one thing puzzled me. Their faces were quite white, the faces of townsmen; and yet these were obviously men in the pink of physical condition, used to the hardest kind of outdoor life. I was so curious I asked why. Mihailoff smiled and said, "Well, you see, we never see the sun, we move at night." It gives you some notion of what the life of a comitadji leader is-a hunted man who could not stay more than two days in one place even before the upset in the Bulgarian Government made him a fugitive on the face of the earth.

We talked about the Macedonian problem and what it meant and what the IMRO was doing and what could be done. As we talked I glanced up suddenly, and for the third time that day my heart lost several beats, because ahead, through the apple trees, there was a little opening, and through the opening came the head and shoulders of a rifleman standing easily with his rifle at the ready; not aiming, just ready. He was guarding Mihailoff, but he was not facing out toward the Yugoslav frontier a few miles away; he was facing in, and the muzzle of that rifle was unpleasantly in my direction. Nothing obtrusive, nothing that a civilian would have noticed, but something whose meaning no soldier could miss for a moment.

During the afternoon I had another terrible scare, because as we leaned over the balcony talking, I looked down the road and saw a platoon of infantry coming along. I said to Mihailoff, "Don't you think you had better get under cover?" "What for?" he asked. "For those fellows." I felt most unhappy. I was beyond the law, I had no right to be there. No one knew where I was. I was quite unarmed. I could look down under the bushes and see the comitadjis all ready for action, and the army coming up the road. But I could not at the time think of anything to do, and I have not since thought of anything that I could have done, so I did nothing. The army marched happily past us and the comitadjis lay under the bushes, while Mihailoff and I went straight on with our conversation. Nothing whatever happened.

THE TROOPS

When it was all over and we were ready to go, Mihailoff saw me looking closely at his men. "Would you like to inspect the troops?" he asked. "You bet I would like to inspect the troops," said I. "Well, come on down." We went down, and the comitadjis, who were quite as interested in an American as I was in them, and who thought me a far stranger object, I dare say, than I thought them, gathered around. Mihailoff tore open the bandoleers and showed me the little bombs which the IMRO makes for just such occasions as the assassination in Marseille, though that assassination happened to be carried out with a pistol. I noticed that the bombs, like those of any other government, carried the stamp of the government, "IMRO"; or in Bulgarian, "VMRO." "Is this discreet?" I asked. Mihailoff smiled slightly: "Oh, yes. We want people to know where they come from."

Then the medical officer tapped a huge wound in a man's cheek, an old scar, and with that innocent professional enthusiasm which seems to belong to medical men of all nations, smiled seraphically and said, "That is my wound. I fixed that up." The comitadjis began to close in from all directions, pulling up the legs of their trousers and the sleeves of their coats, showing the scars of battle-all except one poor fellow who stood aside and looked very sheepish until some one pointed at him and they all began to laugh. I asked what the laughter was for. "Oh," they said, "that is Dmitri -he has been with us for years and he has never been wounded. Isn't it a joke?" And there was a great deal of hearty Balkan laughter.

When I left the camp, I wanted, as any journalist would want, to get to a typewriter as fast as I could. I asked my guard, "Can you put me on the next train for Sofia?" "No, I hardly think you want to go so soon." And I, being an American and very stupid, said, " Oh, yes, I do. I must get right to paper and typewriter now." He said, "No, no, no. There are many things we wish to show you. You'd better stay here for the night." And I said, "Oh, quite. I had better stay here for the night." I did stay there for the night, and again my conduct was impeccable. Understand, I was not a prisoner. I have never been more beautifully entertained in my life. I was a guest-as long as I behaved properly. I never did find out where my guard was. No doubt somewhere outside he watched, first that I should not be annoyed, and second that I should be very well behaved. In the meantime, of course, Mihailoff somewhere off in the night was leaving that part of the country. In political intrigue in the Balkans there is always a chance of treachery, and he was taking no chances.

THE YUGOSLAV FRONTIER

Late that afternoon I was taken up to the Yugoslav frontier. When you understand what the conditions are on the Yugoslav frontier, you will perhaps understand a little better why things like the Marseille assassination happen. We drove down the road, and a few miles out collected the local representative of the IMRO. A few miles farther on we collected the local representative of the Bulgarian Army. They rode up that mountain path with their arms around each other's necks, and I realized then that the army was not at that time hunting the IMRO so eagerly as it has since hunted it. Today, of course, since the overturn in the Bulgarian Government, the Gueorguieff government is hunting Mihailoff very hard indeed, and has driven him out of the country.

We came up then far into the mountains to the last little frontier post, with the Bulgarian infantry captain with us. We walked to a little ditch, six inches wide and three or four inches deep, dug between the two countries. There was a Bulgarian sentry on our side and a Yugoslav sentry on the other side, with a watchdog running on a wire beside the Bulgarian sentry. Behind that little blockhouse, telegraph wires ran back to where a Bulgarian regiment was spread out over forty kilometers, and beside the wires a beacon stood ready to be fired in case the unfriendly soldiers across the way slipped around and cut the wires in the night.

We walked up to the frontier and the Bulgarian officer stuck his toe over the ditch and said, "Well, here it is. Look down there." I looked across on the Yugoslav side and could see in the twilight, a little way down, a barbed wire entanglement being built, and in the ground at my feet were the holes that had been dug for posts that were to hold that entanglement. I have built enough entanglements to know one when I see it. I said to my guide, "Do you mean that this frontier is closed? " " Well, no, it is not exactly closed, only you are not allowed to cross." What he meant was that the Yugoslav Government, a month or two before, had declared the frontier open, in spite of which, crossing was prohibited.

Scenting a story, I said, "Well, I have an American passport in my pocket. It is properly viseed. I am going across the frontier and if they throw me out, all the better. That is a story." They looked at me with one of those expressions that the American gets used to in the Balkans. "You don't seem to understand. Americans never do. Down here, we take the papers from the body." "Just what do you mean?" I asked. "Well, your toes are on the line. One step over and that sentry over there, twenty feet ahead, will shoot you."

Now, it is a cardinal maxim of good journalism, as of good scholarship, that every statement must be verified. But for once I let a statement go unverified and took the word of my informant. When I got back and could talk to people who knew the country better than I, whose word I could trust, I asked about it and was told, "Quite true. One more step and they would have shot." Now, fortunately, it was a day when I was on my good behavior, and nothing happened.

CONDITIONS THAT CAUSE REVOLT

You may ask why a government has to surround itself with such precautions. That barbed wire entanglement was built in order to cut off the Macedonians in Serbian Macedonia from the Macedonians in Bulgaria, in order to break all national links and let a new generation of Macedonians gradually grow up who have forgotten the old ways, the old language, and the old religion, and have been Serbified.

Perhaps that lets you see what the conditions are in that country. Perhaps it lets you see why things like the Marseille assassination happen. I do not defend assassination, as I said in the beginning. I think the murder at Marseille was a horrible thing. But having been in the land of King Alexander's police, and having seen strong men turn white and shake when I merely suggested taking a message to their mothers in Macedonia, and having seen their terror at the mere idea that a message from them might get through, knowing that their families would be visited by police, imprisoned, perhaps tortured, if a mere friendly message was brought by an American stranger, I do think that there is something to be said for ending a situation like this in the Balkans. Make no mistake-the revolutionary organization has not been broken up. Mihailoff has been driven out of Bulgaria; Kyril Drangoff has been arrested; Vlado Gueorguieff [Cherno-zemski], who did the killing at Marseille, is dead. One cannot find any members of the IMRO in Bulgaria now; but they are there all the same. Just as soon as the government changes they will come back. The work of the IMRO will go on. There will be more murders, and each one of these murders has the germs of another Sarajevo in it. If King Alexander had been killed on Italian soil I venture to say that we might have a world war now.

PREWAR SITUATION REVERSED

Finally, I should like to remind you that the present situation in Macedonia is simply the 1914 situation in Austria-Hungary, reversed. In 1914, the Serbs of Austria-Hungary were oppressed by the Austrian Government, and for their relief there existed a nationalist movement in Serbia. Its organization was exactly like the IMRO. It was then called the Black Hand. It has been replaced by another organization called the White Hand, and the saying in the Balkans is that the White Hand casts a black shadow. The Serbian organization with which King Alexander was at one time allied, committed one murder too many. It is said that King Alexander had retired from the organization before the murder. That, at least, is the statement of a sober historian like Professor Sidney Fay. Certainly there is no question that King Alexander was at one time much interested in the work of the Black Hand and contributed to it.

The Serbians at that time were trying to free their oppressed fellow countrymen. They tried to free them by terroristic murders. The murder at Sarajevo was not the only one, it was the last of a series. But it happened to be the wrong murder, coming at the wrong time diplomatically, and the World War was the result.

Today, the Serbs in Yugoslavia are "top dog." They are the masters now. As is so sadly the way with all nations, the moment they became top dog they became oppressors. They are grinding down the Macedonians and the Croatians just as they themselves were ground down. It makes one think that the German philosopher Hegel was right when he said that history teaches only that men learn nothing from history. Today we have the 1914 situation repeated. We have the very grave danger that we may sooner or later have another assassination like that at Marseille, which will have the same fatal result as the one in 1914.

There is, so far as I can see, no possible way out except to see that ordinary justice is done to these people- to see that the Croatians, the Macedonians, and any other minorities who desire to present their cases to the League of Nations shall be allowed to do so. At present, Yugoslavia is allied with France. France is dominant in the Council. A minority petition has no chance. Being denied legal means, the IMRO insists that it will go on by violence. It has repeatedly said that if it were given legal means to work, it would work by legal means. It is in the interests of all of us that the complaints of all the minorities in the Balkans should have a fair hearing, and something should be done about the rights and the sorrows of these people.