"Observers," he writes, "who, like myself, are Macedonians, and, like myself, had ample opportunity of gaining an intimate knowledge of the irredentist propaganda of the Bulgars, Greeks, Serbs, and Vlachs, are able to judge the significance of this striving after a national ideal, and how sweet and inspiring it is to go through the greatest dangers for such a cause.

His model is the Rumanian propaganda among the Vlachs in Macedonia, and his expectations are great: "There is no power in Persia to put down such a movement, because it could do no harm to anyone.

On the memorable field of Kossovo, in 1389, the opposing forces metMurad supported by his Asiatic and European vassals and allies, and Lazar with his formidable army of Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians, Poles, Magyars, and Vlachs.

And, in the second place, as Greeks, Servians, and Bulgarians based their respective claims to Macedonian territory on the racial character of the inhabitants, Roumania asserted that the presence of a large Roumanian (or Vlach) population in that disputed region gave her an equally valid claim to a share in the common estate.

In all Macedonia there may be some 100,000 Vlachs, though Roumanian officials put the number much higher.

This Bulgarian state included a large 'Vlach' element descended from those Latin-speaking provincials whom the Slavs had pushed before them in their original migration; while the main body of the 'Rumans', whom the same thrust of invasion had driven leftwards across the Danube, had established itself in the mountains of Transylvania, and was just beginning to push down into the Wallachian and Moldavian plains.

The Romance-speaking Vlachs of Pindus moved down into the Thessalian plains.

The Vlachs in the gorges of the Aspropotamo were pacified with equal success; and Dramali, Khurshid's lieutenant, who guarded the communications between the army investing Yannina and its base at Constantinople, was easily able to crush all symptoms of revolt in Thessaly from his head-quarters at Lárissa.

The first civil war was fought between Kolokotrónis on the one side and the Primates of Hydhra and Peloponnesos on the other; but the issue was decided against Kolokotrónis by the adhesion to the coalition of Kolettis the Vlach, once physician to Mukhtar Pasha, the son of Ali, and now political agent for all the northern Armatoli in the national service.

The Vlachs again, a Romance-speaking tribe of nomadic shepherds who have wandered as far south as Akarnania and the shores of the Korinthian Gulf, are settling down there to the agricultural life of the Greek village, so that Hellenism stands to them for the transition to a higher social phase.

[Footnote 1: Greece owed her naval supremacy in 1912-13 to the new cruiser Georgios Averof, named after a Vlach millionaire who made his fortune in the Greek colony at Alexandria and left a legacy for the ship's construction at his death.