other. The maintenance and encouragement of mutual suspicions was, in
either case, sedulously fostered by Turkish Sultans, the last of whom,
more especially, acted throughout his inglorious career in the firm
belief that mere mediaeval diplomatic trickery could be made to take the
place of statesmanship. He must have chuckled when he joyously put his
hand to the firman creating a Bulgarian Exarch, who was forthwith
excommunicated by the Greek Patriarch, with the result, as Mr. Miller
tells us, that "peasants killed each other in the name of contending
ecclesiastical establishments."

In the early days of the last century the poet Rhigas, who was to Greece
what Arndt was to Germany and Rouget de Lisle to Revolutionary France,
appealed to all Balkan Christians to rise on behalf of the liberties of
Greece. But the hour had not yet come for any such unity to be cemented.
At that time, and for many years afterwards, Europe was scarcely
conscious of the fact that there existed "a long-forgotten, silent
nationality" which, after a lapse of nearly five centuries, would again
spring into existence and bear a leading part in the liberation of the
Balkan populations. But the rise of Bulgaria, far from bringing unity in
its wake, appeared at first only to exacerbate not merely the mercurial
Greek, proud of the intellectual and political primacy which he had
heretofore enjoyed, but also the brother Slav, with whom differences
arose which necessitated an appeal to the arbitrament of arms.

Although the thunder of the guns of Kirk Kilisse and Luele Burgas
proclaimed to Europe, in the words of the English Prime Minister, that
"the map of Eastern Europe had to be recast," it is none the less true
that the cause of the Turk was doomed from the moment when Balkan
discord ceased, and when the Greek, the Bulgarian, the Serb, and the
Montenegrin agreed to sink their differences and to act together against
the common enemy. Who was it who accomplished this miracle? Mr. Miller
says, "the authorship of this marvellous work, hitherto the despair of
statesmen, is uncertain, but it has been ascribed chiefly to M.
Venezelos." All, therefore, that can now be said is that it was the
brain, or possibly brains, of some master-workers which gave liberty to
the Balkan populations as surely as it was the brain of Cavour which
united Italy.[82]

Although these and possibly other points will, without doubt, eventually
receive more ample treatment at the