try where it is open to criticism; and I freely admit
that Montenegro, morally and politically speaking, is almost as much in
advance of England as it is of Germany. In Montenegro there are no
millionaires--and therefore next to no Socialists. As to why there are
no millionaires, it is a mystery, and best studied among the mysteries
of the Middle Ages. By some of the dark ingenuities of that age of
priestcraft a curious thing was discovered--that if you kill every
usurer, every forestaller, every adulterater, every user of false
weights, every fixer of false boundaries, every land-thief, every
water-thief, you afterwards discover by a strange indirect miracle, or
disconnected truth from heaven, that you have no millionaires. Without
dwelling further on this dark matter, we may say that this great gap in
the Montenegrin experience explains the other great gap--the lack of
Socialists. The Class-conscious Proletarian of All Lands is curiously
absent from this land. The reason (I have sometimes fancied) is that the
Proletarian is class-conscious, not because he is a Proletarian of All
Lands, but because he is a Proletarian with no lands. The poor people in
Montenegro have lands--not landlords. They have roots; for the peasant
is the root of the priest, the poet, and the warrior. And _this_, and
not a mere recrimination about acts of violence, is the ground of the
age-long Balkan bitterness against the Turkish conqueror. Montenegrins
are patriotic for Montenegro; but Turks are not patriotic for Turkey.
They never heard of it, in fact. They are Bedouins, as homeless as the
desert. The "wrong horse" of Lord Salisbury was an Arab steed, only
stabled in Byzantium. It is hard enough to rule vagabond people, like
the gypsies. To be ruled by them is impossible.

Nevertheless what was called the nineteenth century, and named with a
sort of transcendental faith (as in a Pythagorean worship of number),
was wearing to its close with reaction everywhere, and the Turk, the
great type of reaction, stronger than ever in the saddle. The most
civilised of the Christian nations overshadowed by the Crescent dared to
attack it and was overwhelmed in a catastrophe that seemed as
unanswerable as Hittin. In England Gladstone and Gladstonism were dead;
and Mr. Kipling, a less mystical Carlyle, was expending a type of praise
upon the British Army which would have been even more appropriate to the
Prussian Army. The Prussian Army ruled Prussia; Prussi