society.

Now rulers did not create these things; it was the daily activities of
the people, born of their desires and made possible by the circumstances
in which they lived, by the trading and the mining and the shipping
which they carried on, that made them. But the Balkans have been
geographically outside the influence of European industrial and
commercial life. The Turk has hardly felt it at all. He has learnt none
of the social and moral lessons which interdependence and improved
communications have taught the Western European, and it is because he
has not learnt these lessons, because he is a soldier and a conqueror,
to an extent and completeness that other nations of Europe lost a
generation or two since, that the Balkanese are fighting and that war is
raging.

But not merely in this larger sense, but in the more immediate, narrower
sense, are the fundamental causes of this war economic.

This war arises, as the past wars against the Turkish conqueror have
arisen, by the desire of the Christian peoples on whom he lives to shake
off this burden. "To live upon their subjects is the Turks' only means
of livelihood," says one authority. The Turk is an economic parasite,
and the economic organism must end of rejecting him.

For the management of society, simple and primitive even as that of the
Balkan mountains, needs some effort and work and capacity for
administration, or even rudimentary economic life cannot be carried on.
And the Turkish system, founded on the sword and nothing else ("the
finest soldier in Europe"), cannot give that small modicum, of energy or
administrative capacity. The one thing he knows is brute force; but it