which men all so fervently desire, and which must in the
fulness of time lessen the frequency of strife and war. Yet even while
the hopeful words were falling from the speaker's lips, he might have
heard, not in far distance but close at hand, the trumpets and drums,
the heavy rumbling of the cannon, and all the clangour of a world in
arms.

II

OTTOMANS AND THE WEST

One of the central and perennial interests of Mr. Gladstone's life was
that shifting, intractable, and interwoven tangle of conflicting
interests, rival peoples, and antagonistic faiths, that is veiled under
the easy name of the Eastern question. The root of the Eastern question,
as everybody almost too well knows, is the presence of the Ottoman Turks
in Europe, their possession of Constantinople,--that incomparable centre
of imperial power standing in Europe but facing Asia,--and their
sovereignty as Mahometan masters over Christian races. In one of the few
picturesque passages of his eloquence Mr. Gladstone once described the
position of these races. 'They were like a shelving beach that
restrained the ocean. That beach, it is true, is beaten by the waves; it
is laid desolate; it produces nothing; it becomes perhaps nothing save a
mass of shingle, of rock, of almost useless sea-weed. But it is a fence
behind which the cultivated earth can spread, and escape the incoming
tide, and such was the resistance of Bulgarians, of Servians, and of
Greeks. It was that resistance which left Europe to claim the enjoyment
of her own religion and to develop her institutions and her laws.' This
secular strife between Ottoman and Christian gradually became a struggle
among Christian powers of northern and western Europe, to turn
tormenting questions in the east to the advantage of rival ambitions of
their own. At a certain epoch in the eighteenth century Russia first
seized her place among the Powers. By the end of the century she had
pushed her force into the west by the dismemberment of Poland; she had
made her way to the southern shores of the Black Sea; and while still
the most barbaric of all the states, she had made good a vague claim to
exercise the guardianship of civilisation on behalf of the Christian
races and the Orthodox church. This claim it was that led at varying
intervals of time, and with many diversities of place, plea, and colour,
to crisis after crisis springing up within the Turkish em