sion either some new concession to the ever-rising tide of Christian
demand, or ratified the loss of a province which had been forcibly torn
from his flank. Finally, we get to the period when the tragedy connected
with the name of Queen Draga acted like an electric shock on Europe,
and when the accession of King Peter, "who had translated Mill _On
Liberty_," to the blood-stained Servian throne, revealed to an
astonished world that the processes of Byzantinism survived to the
present day. Five years later followed the assumption by Prince
Ferdinand of the title of "Tsar of the Bulgarians," and it then only
required the occurrence of some opportunity and the appearance on the
scene of some Balkan Cavour to bring the struggle of centuries to the
final issue of a death-grapple between the followers of aggressive
Christianity and those of stagnant Islamism.

The whole tale is at once dramatic and dreary, dramatic because it is
occasionally illumined by acts of real heroism, such as the gallant
defence of Plevna by Ghazi Osman, a graphic account of which was written
by an adventurous young Englishman (Mr. W.V. Herbert) who served in the
Turkish army, or again as the conduct of the Cretan Abbot Maneses who,
in 1866, rather than surrender to the Turks, "put a match to the
powder-magazine, thus uniting defenders and assailants in one common
hecatomb." It is dreary because the mind turns with horror and disgust
from the endless record of government by massacre, in which, it is to be
observed, the crime of bloodguiltiness can by no means be laid
exclusively at the door of the dominant race, whilst Mr. Miller's
sombre but perfectly true remark that "assassination or abdication,
execution or exile, has been the normal fate of Balkan rulers," throws a
lurid light on the whole state of Balkan society.

But how does the work of diplomacy, and especially of British diplomacy,
stand revealed by the light of the history of the past century? The
point is one of importance, all the more so because there is a tendency
on the part of some British politicians to mistrust diplomatists, to
think that, either from incapacity or design, they serve as agents to
stimulate war rather than as peace-makers, and to hold that a more
minute interference by the House of Commons in the details of diplomatic
negotiations would be useful and beneficial. It would be impossible
within the limits of an ordinary newspaper article to deal adequately
with this que