Bulgaria and Her People, with an account of the Balkan Wars, Macedonia, and the Macedonian Bulgars
Will S. MonroeOf all the peoples of the Balkan peninsula, the Bulgars are least well known in Europe and America; and yet it is the universal testimony of the few foreigners who have learned to know them intimately that the inhabitants of ** the peasant state," although more recently liberated from the oppressive Turkish role than the other races of the peninsula, have outdistanced the Greeks, the Rumanians, the Serbians, and the Montenegrins in most of the matters that make for social progress and civilization.
Illiteracy, for example, is distinctly lower in Bulgaria than in the other Balkan states. The Bulgars spend twice as much per inhabitant on elementary education as the Serbians, two and a half times as much as the Greeks, and three times as much as the Montenegrins.
As this book is intended for the general reader, the author has stressed the human side of the subject, and treated of a reasonably wide range of general topics,— geography, history, religion, education, ethnic types, agriculture, industry, commerce.